Chat message

Slack / Private Message Drop, p.416 [SLACK_000630] · slack_pm:msg:04301

Date: 2021-01-18 09:56
Type: chat message · slack
recipient: Robert F. Garry, Edward C. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut
speaker: Kristian G. Andersen
Topics: Intelligence community assessments

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

Yeah, we'll have to wait and see - maybe SC2 only has a narrow window for escaping (some level of) immunity, but I'm not convinced that's the case - we only need to look to all the ccCoVs.I warned Alina about her "well adapted to human" comments, making it clear that compared to SARS, yes, that might look to be the case, but there's a whole world of viruses out there where what we're seeing (dN/dS) in SC2 isnothing special. We're definitely seeing that play out now.

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Statement	Grade	Attribution	Stance
Yeah, we'll have to wait and see - maybe SC2 only has a narrow window for escaping (some level of) immunity, but I'm not convinced that's the case - we only need to look to all the ccCoVs.I warned Alina about her "well adapted to human" comments, making it clear that compared to SARS, yes, that might look to be the case, but there's a whole world of viruses out there where what we're seeing (dN/dS) in SC2 isnothing special.	quoted / not their view	quoted_external sentence carries quotation marks	asserts

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quoted / not their view

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2021-01-18 08:26 Kristian G. Andersen open

I may be extremely pessimistic here, but by the time we have vaccinated enough people to reach herd immunity thresholds, I'm pretty sure we'll be dealing with almost completely resistant SARS-CoV-2 - and multiple different lineages.
2021-01-18 08:32 Robert F. Garry open

Maybe true - and it may be time to *start lowering expectations*. It's very possible we'll be in a situation [maybe already there] where the vaccines do not prevent infection or spread but offer some protection from severe disease. AKA flu vaccine. This means getting you ~flu~ CoV vaccine each year or maybe even every 6 months.
2021-01-18 09:06 Robert F. Garry open

In some ways thou the fact that we're seem the same mutations popping up repeatedly is "reassuring" in the sense that it may not take a gazillion.
2021-01-18 09:10 Robert F. Garry open

Alina was clearly wrong on many levels when she stated "SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans." It's what lead her down the path that SC2 must be engineered or GOF. It's not that well adapted apparently because it keeps mutating. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1.full.pdf
2021-01-18 09:56 Kristian G. Andersen

Yeah, we'll have to wait and see - maybe SC2 only has a narrow window for escaping (some level of) immunity, but I'm not convinced that's the case - we only need to look to all the ccCoVs.I warned Alina about her "well adapted to human" comments, making it clear that compared to SARS, yes, that might look to be the case, but there's a whole world of viruses out there where what we're seeing (dN/dS) in SC2 isnothing special. We're definitely seeing that play out now.
2021-01-18 10:14 Kristian G. Andersen open

https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/1351228542143651840?s=20
2021-01-18 10:16 Kristian G. Andersen open

Starts ~40 mins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja_tLG8CLAc
2021-01-18 10:17 Robert F. Garry open

That's worse than expected. Much worse.
2021-01-18 10:26 Kristian G. Andersen open

It's bad indeed - very bad. To me it's not unexpected though - the RSA lineage has multiple mutations that had already been shown to affect immunity, so I can't say I'm surprised (this is unlike b117 - that one has less mutations that seem related to escape). It's much worse than I could have _hoped_ for though. Add to this that I'm getting increasingly concerned that this is because Eek leads to general immune escape and isn't just linked to changing asimple B cell epitope.

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