Slack / Private Message Drop — page 114

P *+61 M *+61 E [2020-07-27 21:49:13] [Eddie Holmes] Doubtless it's Chandra Wickramasinghe. [2020-07-27 22:28:13] [Kristian Andersen] Clever... Points for being a testable hypothesis too. [2020-07-28 01:00:26] [Andrew Rambaut] That's our Nature Micro paper. Didn't I mention the bit about comets? It was Comet Neowise that brought SARS2. [2020-07-28 05:10:43] [Robert Garry] Well done on the email to JC! The worst of the email from the rona expert who can no longer keep silent is the "digging" paragraph. It's seriously offensive - name another person who has made more contributions to virus evolution/phylogentic analysis than AR, EH and KA??? AR had written a paper on MERS evolution and there were others. What "schooling?" We clearly ignored - properly so as the email to JC points out - the schooling from the telecon to not mention "lab escape." [2020-07-28 05:27:51] [Robert Garry] "@Robert Garry did it to boost our Altmetric score. That's a legit move." That will be the ending when they film this whole saga as a Knives-out/Agatha Christie style mystery. [2020-07-28 05:40:51] [Robert Garry] Also totally in to the comet hypothesis. If the aliens sending these viruses on comets are clever enough to put them on comets in the first place, then surely they are clever enough to counter the whole burning up in the atmosphere thing. [2020-07-28 05:42:46] [Andrew Rambaut] I took a picture of Neowise above my house. You can see it is still shedding coronaviruses: [2020-07-28 05:46:16] [Robert Garry] That is awesome! [2020-07-28 11:31:24] [Robert Garry] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/close-relatives-of-the-novel-coronavirus-may-have-circulated-in-bats-for -decades-before-jumping-to-humans/ar-BB17gNfN This piece is also likely to show up in _Scientific American_ according to the reporter, who works both for the paper and _SciAm_. [2020-07-28 17:24:30] [Eddie Holmes] I wonder where Deep Throat will hawk his story next?