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Slack / Private Message Drop, p.214 [SLACK_000428] · slack_pm:msg:02230

Date: 2020-10-07 14:27
Type: chat message · slack
recipient: Kristian G. Andersen, Robert F. Garry, Andrew Rambaut
speaker: Edward C. Holmes

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Science wrote a piece on that rubella paper. Its pretty vexing is that authors say in the Science commentary - as Ialso pointed out to the writer but she ignored - that these new viruses are obviously not the direct ancestors ofrubella virus and yet they don't say that in the original paper! Indeed, they sort to try to imply in the Nature article that they are.

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2020-10-07 14:27 Edward C. Holmes

Science wrote a piece on that rubella paper. Its pretty vexing is that authors say in the Science commentary - as Ialso pointed out to the writer but she ignored - that these new viruses are obviously not the direct ancestors ofrubella virus and yet they don't say that in the original paper! Indeed, they sort to try to imply in the Nature article that they are.
2020-10-07 14:33 Kristian G. Andersen open

Yeah, just came across that article - surprised to see Science writing it up and I can 100% assure you that they triedto imply that these were direct ancestors - it was in their original submission. In the original submission they also talked about how these viruses would "complicate our eradication efforts for rubella and other diseases". Oversellingat its best. I'm totally fine with the paper being published in Nature, but I'm very surprised to say the least.
2020-10-07 14:46 Edward C. Holmes open

Cheeky buggers. Sort of annoying that I told all this to the Science journalist and she lets the authors of the paper make that point. Anyway. Very lucky to get that into Nature.
2020-10-07 14:50 Kristian G. Andersen open

Yeah, very lucky. Good people though, so good for them. I'm surprised @Robert Garry hasn't chimed in - the first author did a lot of stuff in Sierra Leone as part of our program (I spent several week with him there), but I can't remember if he was actually at Tulane or not. Something makes me believe probably yes - he was a bit of a weirdo... :wink:
2020-10-07 15:03 Robert F. Garry open

Not at Tulane AFAIK - I recognize the name and face but we did not interact that much. All I can say about the rubi-like viruses is that at least they didn't try to sell them as human pathogens like Bas-Congo virus. That being said we're about to put something up on virological - might run it by here first - showing serorxty to SARS-CoV-2, N, Sand RBD in samples from SL back to 2008. More questions than answers but the serorxty is definitely there - diff labs, diff proteins, different assays - tried to falsify it but failed.

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