No, #2019-nCoV Is Not a Bioweapon

nakedcapitalism |  At least one finance-adjacent blog (not this one) promoted a bioRxiv pre-print entitled “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag”, containing the inflammatory passage “The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have identity/similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature.” That paper has now been withdrawn. From Richard Sever, Assistant Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Editor of CSH Perspectives, bioRxiv Co-Founder:

Authors of disputed “uncanny” 2019-nCoV preprint to voluntarily withdraw preprint:
"It was not our intention to feed into the conspiracy theories...we appreciate the criticisms...and will get back with a revised version” https://t.co/zGcT1440D0

— Richard Sever Ⓤ (@cshperspectives) February 1, 2020

 

Here is what one bioinformatics research had to say about the now-withdrawn paper:

The 2019-nCoV genome does not contain remarkable genomic properties which need explaining, and for which we’d look to some kind of bioengineering as a cause.
The virus has a close 96% sequence overlap to a naturally occurring bat coronavirus, and coronaviruses have been known to jump from bats to humans by way of intermediates before, like the SARS coronavirus. The differences between the genome sequences, including the ones identified by the Indian study, are in variable regions of the genome that we’d expect to differ, and the 4% difference in the genomes is hard to call as “high” or “low,” given that we don’t know exactly which bats the 2019-nCoV strain came from or when it diverged from its closest known ancestor.

Nor is it surprising that the known 2019-nCoV sequences all contain the same genomic changes relative to a known relative. They all came from the same outbreak from the same animal reservoir, i.e. they only diverged from each other a few months ago at most. It’s not surprising that they haven’t evolved very much away from each other.

Nor does the clinical presentation of 2019-nCoV have novel features which need explaining. Its symptom profile, degree of transmissibility, severity, mortality rate, duration, incubation and latent period, ability to jump from animals to humans, and ability to transmit asymptomatically and by skin contact are all within the precedents established by other human coronaviruses.

That is, the 2019-nCoV genome and the way it affects humans have, by themselves, no special anomaly which needs explaining.

(More on 2019-nCoV and bat corona viruses here.) Further, from Infection, Genetics and Evolution, “Full-genome evolutionary analysis of the novel corona virus (2019-nCoV) rejects the hypothesis of emergence as a result of a recent recombination event“:

The levels of genetic similarity between the 2019-nCoV and [BatCoV] RaTG13 suggest that the latter does not provide the exact variant that caused the outbreak in humans, but the hypothesis that 2019-nCoV has originated from bats is very likely. We show evidence that the novel coronavirus (2019-nCov) is not-mosaic consisting in almost half of its genome of a distinct lineage within the betacoronavirus.