Chat message

Slack / Private Message Drop, p.410 [SLACK_000624] · slack_pm:msg:04240

Date: 2021-01-16 11:22
Type: chat message · slack
recipient: Kristian G. Andersen, Edward C. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut
speaker: Robert F. Garry

Recipients on this medium are inferred from channel membership, not per-message addressing.

If Shi would have had a virus closer to RaTG13 she damn well would have reported it in her Nature paper. That simple fact precludes any nefarious engineering BS. All that's left for "lab escape," which we have all acknowledgedis a remote possibility is that some Dingleberry (?) working on samples in lab brought in from the wild theinadvertently infected herself with the 99+% progenitor to SC2 that they then didn't bother to characterize.

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2021-01-16 11:07 Robert F. Garry open

https://mbio.asm.org/content/6/4/e01013-15 The types of lab release scenarios that Chan is describing aren't closeto what happened in 1977 H1N1.
2021-01-16 11:10 Kristian G. Andersen open

Correct. But what's most important here - and I have mentioned this to Jesse - you can't just look at flu pandemics -you need to look at emergence events. How many natural emergence events are there vs those linked to the lab?
2021-01-16 11:12 Kristian G. Andersen open

It's misleading and inappropriate for people like Jesse to make these statements - it makes it sound as if our prior probability of lab escape would be 0.2. It's many orders of magnitude lower than that. Sure, the fact that WIV was/isdoing work on SARS-like CoVs elevates that prior probability (but a lot), but it still gets it nowhere near the "50/50"scenario Jesse is talking about. He of all people should know that.
2021-01-16 11:15 Kristian G. Andersen open

All these folks are stuck in their inappropriate priors and not updating them based on data. It's rather sad, really.
2021-01-16 11:22 Robert F. Garry

If Shi would have had a virus closer to RaTG13 she damn well would have reported it in her Nature paper. That simple fact precludes any nefarious engineering BS. All that's left for "lab escape," which we have all acknowledgedis a remote possibility is that some Dingleberry (?) working on samples in lab brought in from the wild theinadvertently infected herself with the 99+% progenitor to SC2 that they then didn't bother to characterize.
2021-01-16 11:31 Kristian G. Andersen open

Yup, that's it. Not impossible, just not very likely given the other possible scenarios.

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