Wuhan Institute of Virology: HATERS HURT'N MY FEELINGS! I DINDU NUFFIN!!!

SCMP |  A Chinese research institute in the city of Wuhan – ground zero of the coronavirus outbreak

– has again dismissed rumours suggesting it is linked to the public health crisis, saying it has been “badly hurt” by conspiracy theories circulating online.

 

“The rumours … have caused severe damage to our researchers who have been dedicated to working on the front line, and seriously interrupted the emergency research we are doing during the epidemic,” the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a statement.

Those rumours included that the new virus strain was “man-made”, “leaked from the WIV lab”, that “the WIV was taken over by the military”, “a WIV researcher died from the leaked virus”, “a WIV student is patient zero”, and “a WIV researcher reported to authorities that the WIV chief was responsible” for the epidemic, the statement posted on its website on Wednesday said.

The institute runs the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, the only facility in China equipped to diagnose and research easily transmitted pathogens at the highest biosafety level of four.

“Looking back on our hard work over the past month, we have nothing to be ashamed of or to regret,” the statement said.

A prominent virologist with the institute has also been targeted by the rumours. Shi Zhengli’s exploration of caves in Yunnan province discovered that another deadly coronavirus – which caused the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars, epidemic in 2002-03 – had originated in bats. Her database of viruses found in bats provided evidence for the theory that the coronavirus at the centre of the ongoing epidemic was also linked to bats. The new virus strain was found to be 96 per cent identical to one found in bats.

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I'm not a virologist and don't pretend to be. But I can read a fugging manual with the best of them, and understand what I've read. That said, slowly reread the nature paper from 2015 yourself. 

Therefore, to examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein—from the RsSHC014-CoV sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats¹—in the context of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone. The hybrid virus allowed us to evaluate the ability of the novel spike protein to cause disease independently of other necessary adaptive mutations in its natural backbone. Using this approach, we characterized CoV infection mediated by the SHC014 spike protein in primary human airway cells and in vivo, and tested the efficacy of available immune therapeutics against SHC014-CoV. Together, the strategy translates metagenomics data to help predict and prepare for future emergent viruses.

Shi Zhengli - you know you done f'd up....,