Slack / Private Message Drop — page 29

This guy keeps emailing me. Are you getting them as well? Hopefully he will fuck-off soon. https://medium.com/@jonseymour/an-open-letter-to-the-authors-of-the-proximal-origin-of-sars-cov-2-12f53c1cea38 [2020-05-15 20:58:56] [Kristian Andersen] Nope - haven't heard a peep from this tit [2020-05-16 04:49:29] [Robert Garry] Me neither, but I could have missed it somewhere in the barrage of "do you believe Fair?" emails. Answer no BTW. "_However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that *any* type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."_ [2020-05-16 04:54:56] [Robert Garry] This sentence in question is just about as careful and nuanced as it could be. "we do not believe" ergo this is our opinion. "plausible" means: sure we can't rule out that the Red Army created this in a lab with help from 9 foot tall green spacewomen, but sticking to reality it's very unlikely. [2020-05-18 16:51:25] [Kristian Andersen] @Eddie Holmes - your questions earlier last week, were they referring to this paper? https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1 I find it to be quite interesting and they pick up on some of the exact features of (lack of) selection that I reported back in February. Certainly peculiar - and I think lends _some_ evidence to the pre-circulation theory. [2020-05-18 16:53:01] [Kristian Andersen] Back in February I compared S and ORF1 - so just here for reference (very similar to what they observe) [shared file(s): Screen Shot 2020-05-18 at 4.52.06 PM.png] [2020-05-18 17:40:45] [Eddie Holmes] No, they weren't. I asked some questions by my friends who drive cars with blacked out windows if you know what I mean. I saw that paper and of course reminded me of your earlier analysis. Not quite sure what to think: that paper is deliberately trying to be controversial by not excluding lab escape. But would lab culturing have produced a 'perfectly' adapted human virus? I don't see way. Did the 2013-2016 EBOV require any human adaptation? [2020-05-18 17:42:54] [Kristian Andersen] "lab culturing have produced a 'perfectly' adapted human virus" - I'm not quite sure. I would think not (outside the spike), but it depends on what drives the selection and that is unclear to me. We both have papers on Ebola human adaptation, so I'd say yes :wink: [2020-05-18 17:46:25] [Kristian Andersen] When it comes to the selection argument, what is still most telling to be is the RBD. SARS changed the contact residues a lot getting into humans, so a lot of the signal might have been driven by that. SARS-CoV-2 is already 'perfect' for binding, so it doesn't need to - BUT that 'perfect' RBD is found in a pangolin CoV, so clearly it already exists in nature - no further adaptation needed it seems. [2020-05-18 17:48:47] [Kristian Andersen]