Slack / Private Message Drop — page 260

[2020-11-16 18:58:46] [Kristian Andersen] Prof. Clouseau is on the case :female-detective: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1328487018679119873?s=20 [2020-11-16 18:59:15] [Kristian Andersen] [don't waste your time] [2020-11-16 19:19:27] [Eddie Holmes] She's such an idiot. Clearly no data will suffice. [2020-11-17 05:58:53] [Robert Garry] Alina: "Does anyone believe me yet that we need to see what exactly were the communications between the authors, journals, and peer reviewers since January?" There are valid arguments for and against open peer review. What Alina is suggesting goes way beyond open peer review however and implies that the journals are corrupt. She would like to set the rules, but she can't and shouldn't. [2020-11-17 09:05:41] [Kristian Andersen] What a dick move from Frankie Bollocks... Good for you calling him out @Andrew Rambaut! [2020-11-17 09:05:59] [Kristian Andersen] One thing from the preprint I agree about though - and mentioned when I testified in front of the Danish parlament yesterday "The rapid acquisition and spread of SARS-CoV-2 mutations in minks suggests that if a similar phenomenon of host adaptation had occurred upon its jump into humans, those human-specific mutations would likely have reached fixation already before the first SARS-CoV-2 genomes were generated". That could very likely be true - ultra fast fixation during the first few rounds of human to human transmission. [2020-11-17 09:08:37] [Andrew Rambaut] Yes. I have been saying that for years. Clear in avian flu too (the same mutations come up). Adaptations to the within-host environment are very rapid. Adaptations to transmission will be much slower. Thus viruses that jump and spread are likely already able to spread but may need some tweaking for within-host growth. [2020-11-17 09:09:54] [Andrew Rambaut] The other thing that virologists struggle with is that better receptor binding does not equal fitter viruses. [2020-11-17 09:13:23] [Andrew Rambaut] But even with the mink, there are lots of lineages in Marion's trees that don't have Y453F. [2020-11-17 09:13:23] [Kristian Andersen] Yup, I have been hearing you saying this for years - for Ebola too. For SARS we actually got to see some of those mutations because we captured the intermediate host - would be very interesting to see for SARS2 as well, but the mink data is definitely interesting in this regard. [2020-11-17 09:14:03] [Kristian Andersen] Yeah, I'm not quite sure what Y453F is about - might just be marginally beneficial.