Chat message

Slack / Private Message Drop, p.763 [SLACK_000977] · slack_pm:msg:07989

Date: 2021-05-08 05:43
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.

Let's see if RelBloom actually say anything specific tomorrow. I'm betting on more of the same nonspecific arm waving - look:face_with_rolling_eyes: there's a lab [a big one with spacesuits] in Wuhan and they did [maybe dangerous] experiments with [gasp] coronaviruses.

In context

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2021-05-08 05:43 Robert F. Garry

Let's see if RelBloom actually say anything specific tomorrow. I'm betting on more of the same nonspecific arm waving - look:face_with_rolling_eyes: there's a lab [a big one with spacesuits] in Wuhan and they did [maybe dangerous] experiments with [gasp] coronaviruses.
2021-05-08 05:47 Robert F. Garry open

Important article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opinion/coronavirus-airborne-transmission.html
2021-05-08 06:03 Robert F. Garry open

The airborne story is a big one IMO. And, a reminder that when it comes to science that truth takes longer to spread- but it does find a way. [shared file(s): image.png, image.png, image.png]
2021-05-08 06:31 Robert F. Garry open

I'm hoping RelBloom do something like Relman did here: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29246 "Some have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is unlikely because one would not have had the insight _a priori_ todesign the current pandemic virus (*3*). This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory--for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been alogical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory. Alternatively, the complete SARS-CoV-2 sequence could have been recovered from a bat sample and viable virusresurrected from a synthetic genome to study it, before that virus accidentally escaped from the laboratory. The third scenario, seemingly much less likely, involves laboratory manipulation or release, with the clear intention of causing harm."
2021-05-08 06:32 Robert F. Garry open

Relman (2020) speculated that closer relatives of SARS-CoV-2 than RatG13 existed at WIV that have not been revealed to the world. However, if such a precursor existed at WIV it would have been logical to reveal its existence, instead of RaTG13, as that would have immediately confirmed the zoonotic nature of COVID-19.

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