COVID-19 Records

Private channel session 1523

27 messages over 3h 8m, 2021-06-19 – 2021-06-19.

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.

  1. 2021-06-19 13:30 Robert F. Garry open PDF p.947
    @Kristian Andersen let me know if you want to have call later today/tomorrow before Tony/FrancisII - interested inyour thoughts
  2. 2021-06-19 14:08 Kristian G. Andersen open PDF p.947
    Yeah cutting my trip short for this and will be back tonight. Can we set up a call Sunday am with Andrew too?
  3. 2021-06-19 14:09 Kristian G. Andersen open PDF p.947
    I haven't looked at any of this yet
  4. 2021-06-19 14:44 Robert F. Garry open PDF p.947
    "The second explanation, which was proposed in a blog post by Garry (2021) and amplified by a popular podcast (Racaniello _et al._ 2021), is that there were multiple zoonoses from distinct markets, with the Huanan Seafood Market being the source of viruses in clade B, and some other market being the source of viruses that lack the T8782C and C28144T mutations. However, inspection of Fig- ure 4 shows that clade B is connected to viruses lacking T8782C and C28144T by single mutational steps via other human iso- lates, so this explanation requires not only positing two markets with two progenitors differing by just two mutations, but also the exceedingly improbableevolution of one of these progenitors towards the other after it had jumped to humans." Actually no - simple to see how the mutations might have become fixed in the progression -I think the take-home is JB is dead set that Rambautis wrong and actually B came before A. Because? [shared file(s): image.png]
  5. 2021-06-19 14:45 Edward C. Holmes open PDF p.947
    Is this something or nothing? I can't quite get my head around it.
  6. 2021-06-19 14:49 Robert F. Garry open PDF p.947
    I think JB main point is they removed some SRA data re early cases - the data IMO - and maybe I can be shown the error of my ways - adds basically zero. It allows JB to complain about lack of transparency I guess.
  7. 2021-06-19 14:49 Andrew Rambaut open PDF p.947
    We already discussed this - the 'intermediates' are dubious and from February
  8. 2021-06-19 14:52 Edward C. Holmes open PDF p.947
    It's a weird sort of stream of consciousness paper. Very naughty to include an email from the unrelated pangolin study in there. Is that even legal?
  9. 2021-06-19 14:56 Robert F. Garry open PDF p.947
    The WA1 tree - fig 4 and 6 looks fine to me - but me and trees so i really dunno. However the midle guangdong tree looks like :hankey: and forced just based on where WA1 lands, but again i'm no good here at all.
  10. 2021-06-19 14:58 Edward C. Holmes open PDF p.947
    The February part seems important....
  11. 2021-06-19 15:02 Robert F. Garry open PDF p.947
    Unrelated pangolin study - must be either from Alina or a present to Alina. Seriously - not legal - invasion of privacy -unless he got permission somehow from all parties.
  12. 2021-06-19 15:03 Edward C. Holmes open PDF p.948
    Yes, I agree. Can't believe he is doing this.
  13. 2021-06-19 15:31 Andrew Rambaut open PDF p.948
    Where did this paper come from? Is it public?
  14. 2021-06-19 15:33 Robert F. Garry open PDF p.948
    WA1 "The patient is a man in his 30s who lives alone. He had been traveling solo since November in Wuhan, China,a city of 11 million where the outbreak appears to have originated, health officials said. He had no symptoms on hisflight or when he arrived at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Jan. 15, but he contacted doctors Jan. 19 whenhe developed a fever and cough, officials said. It's unknown which clinic he visited that day. The man was hospitalized for pneumonia and, on Monday, tested positive for coronavirus."
  15. 2021-06-19 15:37 Robert F. Garry open PDF p.948
    Apparently according to Francis Collins: "Jesse Bloom has just submitted to BioRxiv (attached)." So not up there yet. @Andrew Rambaut
  16. 2021-06-19 15:39 Robert F. Garry open PDF p.948
    and this just in from JB to the email chain (foias R' us) By the way, I just wanted to add one last piece of information prior to the meeting that might be relevant. Because the e-mail Steve Sherry found from Wuhan University about the request to delete PRJNA612766mentioned deleting two projects, I pointed my pipeline that is currently scanning for SRA deletions to that range ofSRRs. It appears that the other largest chunk of contiguous deleted accessions of SARS-CoV-2 sequencing is fromSRR11313377 to SRR11313509, which comes immediately after the PRJNA612766 accessions. I suspect that this might be the other sequencing project that Wuhan University requested to delete in their e-mail to the SRA? It mightbe informative if NCBI is able to confirm that just so we know that we have the both project deletions covered before meeting tomorrow. I'm not going to have time to properly analyze the runs from SRR11313377 to SRR11313509 before tomorrow, buton an extremely cursory glance nothing looks that striking from those runs. Some of them contain the mutationA15090T which is not a mutation that I've come across before in early-ish isolates, but there isn't obvious significance of that mutation as the identity is A in most of the closely related bat coronaviruses (other than PrC31).-- Jesse Bloom Associate Professor, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
  17. 2021-06-19 15:56 Robert F. Garry open PDF p.948
    Is this science? "It therefore seems likely the sequences were deleted to obscure their existence. Particularly in lightof the directive that labs destroy early samples (Pingui 2020) and multiple orders requiring approval of publicationson COVID-19 (China CDC 2020; Kang _et al._ 2020a), this sug- gests a less than wholehearted effort to trace early spread of the epidemic."
  18. 2021-06-19 15:59 Edward C. Holmes open PDF p.948
    The direction to destroy the samples was from Jan 3rd 2020. It's got nothing to do with covering origins, and all to dowith controlling the message. The pangolin stuff is actually from the USRTK from last year.
  19. 2021-06-19 16:03 Robert F. Garry open PDF p.949
    "Finally, both plausible putative progenitors require that an early mutation to SARS-CoV-2 was a reversion towards the bat coron- avirus outgroups (either C18060T or C29095T) on a branch that subsequently gave rise to multiple distinct descendants." WAIT is this true - I thought WA1 was T18060 so bat-like.
  20. 2021-06-19 16:10 Edward C. Holmes open PDF p.949
    Well, Jesse has gone full-on conspiracy. I can well imagine people deleting data because they were shit scared what the state would do to them. And he's right that China want to control the message on origins...they are particularly keen that it is not China.
  21. 2021-06-19 16:13 Andrew Rambaut open PDF p.949
    What does he think they were trying to cover up? That there was something that was one SNP closer to a bat virus that hadn't even been sequenced by then?
  22. 2021-06-19 16:13 Andrew Rambaut open PDF p.949
    Unless it was !!!
  23. 2021-06-19 16:18 Edward C. Holmes open PDF p.949
    Yes, and it would mean that someone did in China did some very detailed analysis very quickly and spotted this themselves. I can't see that they data deletion is specific to what the data actually says.
  24. 2021-06-19 16:22 Robert F. Garry open PDF p.949
    He's not overthinking this - Chinese scientist deletes sequences - holy shit it's a cover-up - must be a lab leak.
  25. 2021-06-19 16:24 Robert F. Garry open PDF p.949
    that was the fox news - murdock version coming to a tv screen near you very soon...
  26. 2021-06-19 16:30 Edward C. Holmes open PDF p.949
    There's also news/rumours about China's top spy defecting to the US in Feb and providing info about a lab leak. I've just heard it on the radio. No idea what this actually means.https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/18/rumours-swirl-chinas-top-spycatcher-has-defected-us/
  27. 2021-06-19 16:39 Robert F. Garry open PDF p.949
    If he's wearing a raccoon dog coat, I'm all ears!