Suzanne Humphries on covid: what the evidence says · JRE #2294
SUBJECT: COVID
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
Medical papers were retracted. I mean, there's this one guy named Pradhan, P-R-A-D-H-A-N, who he showed that there is a GP120 protein on the spike. And he said it was an uncanny similarity to the GP120 in HIV and that there was no way
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Pradhan et al. posted a bioRxiv preprint on January 31, 2020 titled 'Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag,' but they voluntarily withdrew it within two days, with an author stating it was not their intention to feed conspiracy theories and that no such claims were made. Independent scientists including Kristian Andersen and Trevor Bedford quickly showed the analysis was flawed: the matched sequences are so short that they align with many unrelated organisms and are not uniquely derived from HIV, and Bedford found the supposed insertions were either present in bat coronaviruses or were alignment artifacts. The peer-reviewed Nature Medicine paper 'The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2' concluded the virus is not a laboratory construct or purposefully manipulated and that its spike features arose through natural processes. So the framing that Pradhan 'showed' an uncanny HIV similarity that could not arise naturally describes a retracted, debunked preprint rather than an established finding.