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Do you have a link? i remember something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27324055 Note that it is based in a retracted preprint, so it's not confirmed at all.

The idea of the paper is that they look for parts in one f the proteins of covid-19 that are not in other covirus they already know. Then they searched for these new parts in the proteins of other virus, and one of this parts "is" in HIV.

The first problem is that the fragment is too short. So there is a huge chance to find it somewhere just by luck. It's like if I edit may comment and add the word "revenge", and then someone claims I copied that word from a famous book that uses it.

The second problem, is that they didn't find exact matches, the examples they got are very short but have gasp in the middle. It's much easier to find a coincidence. It's like if I edit may comment and add the word "revenue", and then someone claims I copied that word from a famous book that uses "revenge" instead.







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