Private channel session 1277
21 messages over 1h 26m, 2021-04-22 – 2021-04-22.
A “conversation” here is an activity session — a run of messages with under 60 minutes of silence inside it. The channel had no native conversation boundaries.
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"It should be clarified that theories about a hypothetical man-made origin of SARS-CoV-2 have been thoroughly discredited by multiple coronavirus experts.21,28,29" "It is also highly unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 was released from a laboratory by accident because no laboratory had the virus nor did its genetic sequence exist in any sequence database before its initial GenBank deposition (early January 2020). China's laboratory safety practices, policies, training, and engineering are equivalent to those of the United States and other developed countries,32 making viral "escape" extremely unlikely, and of course impossible without a viral isolate present. SARS-CoV-2 shares genetic properties with many other sarbecoviruses, lies fully within their genetic cluster, and is thus a virus that emerged naturally."
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Yup - and that's a good article.
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[from people who would know]
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Really love the "Nature is clearly a cauldron for intense and dangerous coronavirus evolution" bit.
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Yeah. And this was written before we saw all the crazy new viruses and variants as of late - nature really is frightening.
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https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/jgv/10.1099/jgv.0.001586
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It's a respirovirus. The clue is in the title. Nothing to do with SC2 at all.
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Who would have imaged that any one animal could be infected with more than one respiratory virus?
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Is she so dumb as to not realise that 'resipirovirus' is a taxonomic name?
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Yes - actually dumber.
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Yes, she's clearly behind that PLoS request. Like @Andrew Rambaut I was also asked by PLoS to look at that paper yesterday. I declined because I said that I would be classed as having a conflict of interest.
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I'm not quite sure what she's trying to say - that first they said it was SARS-CoV-2 and then later repackaged the paper when they realized it was a resipirovirus?
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Just spectacularly stupid
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They'd already reported the respirovirus in the pangolins. This was just a follow-up study.
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Someone reply to her with this link: https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=respirovirus
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Liu P, Chen W, Chen JP. Viral metagenomics revealed Sendai virus and coronavirus infection of Malayan pangolins (Manis javanica). Viruses 2019;11:979.
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There you go.
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Where is a good journalist when you need one?
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https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3130470/coronavirus-chinese-expert-rails-against-tedros-andwuhan-lab
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Tedros did this in a ham-handed way. Not sure what was in his head (pressure from other countries maybe], but if Ihad been on the study would definitely have been pissed off.
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Agreed. He was just so keen to get the US back into the fold.