Slack / Private Message Drop — page 132

SLACK_000346 [Robert Garry] Dear Dr. Garry, It has been several months since we last spoke -- I hope you are well. NBC News correspondent Janis MacKey Frayer was granted a tour of the WIV BSL 4 labs on Friday -- the first international correspondent to do so since the Covid outbreak. She will file for The Today Show tomorrow, Monday. I know from your NATURE article on the origins of the virus and our conversations that you and your co-authors concluded that it is improbable that the virus was manufactured in a lab. Because that was several months ago now (feels like a lifetime ago!), I wanted to get an update from you as to whether you still feel that it is impossible or improbable that the outbreak started from the WIV labs in any form. (Manufactured or just "escaped" due to an error of some sort.) I know you may very well feel that this has been "asked and answered" many times, but in the interests of accuracy I wanted to check in before this airs tomorrow morning. Kind regards, Amy Amy Perrette Producer NBC News London [Robert Garry] I thought the Today Show had a science contributor? [Kristian Andersen] Hah! And this is pretty interesting... [Eddie Holmes] I got the same [Eddie Holmes] Did you reply Bob? [Robert Garry] Yes - told her no change -highly improbable. [Eddie Holmes] I'll do the same [Andrew Rambaut] And that if they were doing GOF experiments in a Cat 4 lab then they are much more safety conscious than the Netherlands or the US. [Robert Garry] True! In other weekend emails - Virology Journal EiC (Batman!) asked me to participate in a letter re the CDC chloroquine/SARS paper clarifying that NIH/Fauci did not run the journal in 2005. Hmmm. Little known factoid: the only reason I started VJ was to provide a little balance - there was already a PNAS.