A single line often inverts meaning once you see what it
answers, so neighbouring messages are always shown.
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As an aside, if you look at the gamey tastes figure you will see that some of the pangolins sold as food were sick. We've just done some SRA mining and found that the found the famous data produced by Liu et al. in that Viruses papers of 2019 also contains a pestivirus. And you wonder why disease emergence events happen.
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As an aside - trying to dig into papers eDim and others describe as gain-of-function / GOF at WIV. This seems to bethe main (only?) one: https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698.VERY clearly not GOF as defined here (they don't do serial passage, they don't create the chimeric viruses to be"better pathogens", they're not SARS, MERS, or flu, etc., etc. - and the chimeric viruses actually bind worse tohuman receptors than wildtype):https://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/documents/gain-of-function.pdfhttps://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/documents/p3co.pdfIt's total BS.Just FYI since this might come up in random conversation...
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Yes, that's biodiversity. No way GOF.
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They make chimeric viruses in the paper (small part), but still not GOF.
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2021-05-11 22:05
Edward C. Holmes
Ah, got it.
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They emailed us!
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Aaaaaahahahahaha [shared file(s): Upcoming letter in Science]
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I'm not replying. I just won't be able to control my anger.
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I'll sleep on it and wait for Andrew/Bob to chime in with what they think. I'm thinking a short email to say thanks and that we'd welcome further discussion (maybe an actual Zoom call? I'd be interested in that). I'll then include myprepared comments: _The core message of the letter is that the origins of COVID-19 should be investigated, which I think we all agreeon. The authors are correct that both hypotheses are possible, but current evidence points to a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2, as the WHO and others have concluded._ _Unfortunately, the letter suggests a false equivalence between the lab escape and natural origin scenarios. To this day, no credible evidence has been presented to support the lab leak hypothesis, which remains grounded inspeculation. Instead, available scientific data, including those derived from epidemiological, ecological, clinical, and genomic investigations, are consistent with a natural emergence of a novel virus from a zoonotic reservoir, as has been observed so many times in the past.__I staunchly support further evidence-based studies into the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic and the most effective way to do this would be to continue to build on the work done by the WHO, while ensuring they have the necessary mandate and support. If our main goal is to truly understand what led to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, such studies need to be collaborative and cannot consist of one-sided demands that are unlikely to be met._