A single line often inverts meaning once you see what it
answers, so neighbouring messages are always shown.
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Had a long chat with Dominic: (i) he thinks that it could well be raccoon dogs or mink neither of which have been tested and that there was great push back from the Chinese about even investigating this idea. So, these animals have not been tested; (ii) he said that the WIV staff came across as totally open and honest. He said that privately Shi told them she was very worried about a lab escape and they did 2 internal audits and found nothing.
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This? [shared file(s): Screen Shot 2021-03-29 at 4.22.14 PM.png]
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"Shi told them she was very worried about a lab escape and they did 2 internal audits and found nothing". This bit bothers me - and I mentioned this back when she made a similar comment to SciAm. It clearly shows she found it a likely explanation.
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... but they again, she _would_ need to consider it a possibility - we did.
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2021-03-29 16:25
Edward C. Holmes
As did we Kristian. I think I would be more bothered if she had not considered the possibility. To me, she comes across as honest.
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What do you make of that ACE2 stuff? If all their staff are negative then it's game over....unless there's been massive cover-up.
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"her laboratory used recombinant viruses to test whether bat CoVs could use ACE2 to bind but used bat spike protein on *a bat-CoV backbone*, not human SARS" Which backbone?
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"*other researchers* engineered SHC014 spike so did not need isolates for mouse experiments. WIV began recombinant work in 2015 with WIV-1. It received ACE2 mice in 2016 and *started recombinant experiments with WIV +SHC014* in 2018 but did not finish them owing to the COVID outbreak" This might all just be bad writing, but there's a lot of wiggle room in these statements. I'm not really sure how tointerpret them.
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Yes, I couldn't quite follow it either. I guess she means SCH014 which is a SARS-like virus. This accords with her comments to John Cohen that they were only working on SARS-like viruses.