Slack / Private Message Drop — page 293

[Robert Garry] https://mygenomix.medium.com/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-is-a-riddle-meet-the-twitter-detectives-who-aim-to-solve-it-5 0502"If social media is not your thing and you prefer traditional scientific articles, no worries. Below there's a list of works authored by people mentioned above, as well as others that I didn't mention: for instance, you will find the first peer-reviewed paper speculating on the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, by Dan Sirotkin (Twitter account @Harvard2H); the fascinating Bayesian analysis by Gilles Demaneuf and Rodolphe de Maistre; the preprint by Daoyu Zhang (Twitter account @flavinkins), who first questioned the data on pangolin coronaviruses; the lab leak hypothesis proposed by Anon, which perfectly fits with this detective saga; last but not least, the memorable Medium article by Yuri Deigin on the gain-of-function experiments that were carried out in Wuhan. So many people were involved, as you may see, but this should not come as a surprise: science is a collective enterprise, even when you do it on Twitter." [2020-12-04 07:49:30] [Robert Garry] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/12/04/vaccine-ethics-does-continuing-covid-19-trials-put-volunte ers-risk/6473436002/ This was one reason I advocated for human challenge trials - those in the placebo arm remain "sitting ducks." [2020-12-04 08:28:38] [Andrew Rambaut] The Wellcome Trust is funding a challenge trial. They have manufactured the virus. I don't which vaccines they intend to use. [2020-12-04 09:12:05] [Robert Garry] GOOD! A major question that randomized "wild" trials will struggle to answer is whether vaccinees still produce enough virus to remain infectious if exposed. Contrary to what I thought would be the case we found at Tulane that virus load had very little impact on whether or not a student was a "spreader." There was not complete sterilizing immunity in the NHP challenge trials AFAIK. So, you could have a situation where vaccinees are protected against serious disease, but are still able to transmit the virus to some degree. [2020-12-04 09:17:10] [Kristian Andersen] Damn IgA vs IgG! As for sterilizing immunity - the animal trials for both the J&J and RNA vaccines were promising on this aspect - the Oxford vaccine, not at all. [2020-12-04 09:18:41] [Andrew Rambaut] But the RNA vaccines may recombine with your viruses and integrate into your genome and all sorts of things. [2020-12-04 09:20:26] [Kristian Andersen] ... and lead to sterilization. Which may not be a bad thing. [2020-12-04 12:20:42] [Kristian Andersen] @Andrew Rambaut I can see you have resorted to only reading The Onion these days. Might not be a bad idea. [2020-12-04 12:22:01] [Andrew Rambaut] Been getting all of my news from the Onion for at least 20 years. [2020-12-05 06:40:52] [Robert Garry] Onion>Fox>Newsmax