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Over the past few days, the mainstream press has vigorously pushed back against a theory about the origins of the coronavirus that has now infected as many as 70,000+ people in Wuhan alone (depending on whom you believe). The theory is that China obtained the coronavirus via a Canadian research program, and started molding it into a bioweapon at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan. Politifact pointed the finger at Zero Hedge, in particular, though the story was widely shared across independent-leaning media.
The theory is that the virus, which was developed by infectious disease experts to function as a bio-weapon, originated in the Wuhan-based lab of Dr. Peng Zhou, China's preeminent researcher of bat immune systems, specifically in how their immune systems adapt to the presence of viruses like coronavirus and other destructive viruses. Somehow, the virus escaped from the lab, and the Hunan fish market where the virus supposedly originated is merely a ruse."
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---- Earlier posted section on HIV receptors was removed. ---
Note also this comment from this paper. "Gaetan Burgio • 5 hours ago
I performed an alignement of these sequences and indeed found that these 4 insertions mentioned in the preprint are real. However I blasted each of these insertions to the non-redundant protein database and found over 100 hits for every single of these 4 insertions. The hits are others coronaviruses, plants, parasites, bacteria. This indicates the hits to HIV seems fortuitous and the evolutionary link between 2019-nCoV and HIV is to me not ascertained. Additionally, the authors in the manuscripts did not provide a e.value for their findings, nor they have explained in their methodology why they restricted their search for viral genomes only and not others organisms. Therefore I would argue that the results presented do not appear "uncanny" to me based on a flawed methodology. Therefore the results presented in this paper should be taken very cautiously.
Gaetan Burgio (the Australian National University)
(Grammer not corrected)
UPDATE: This bioweapon paper has been withdrawn from the pre-print journal BioRxiv. This does not mean that it is wrong but the authors were severely criticized for breaking the bounds of propriety.
UPDATE2: The Bioweapon thesis is not panning out in newer papers. Here is a paper that discusses different receptors than the Indian Bioweapon paper.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.31.929042v1
