Slack / Private Message Drop — page 358

[2021-01-04 12:57:41] [Eddie Holmes] Yes, zero new here. Same old stuff. It's bunch of starving hyenas fighting over a few shitty bones. I think Linfa Wang is losing the plot. In that Times article he suggests that the serology results from Italy might be true - that's 14% seropositive in Rome in September 2019. Bonkers. [2021-01-04 13:54:55] [Robert Garry] BTW - Pottinger has been the lead antiChina hawk from day one in the Trump Administration. He lived in China for many years and is married to a Chinese physician. As for the serology the positives are meaningless - you get cross-reactivity with seasonal coronaviruses, so %seropositive is simply a matter of where you place the cutoff. *Until you have sequence* from a sample anywhere before late 2019 you don't have anything except an opportunity to be foolish. [2021-01-04 14:51:15] [Eddie Holmes] Totally agree Bob. [2021-01-04 14:59:04] [Robert Garry] thanks Eddie - I'm getting very concerned where all this is going. For example the Lab leak hypothesis paper starts out: "Nevertheless, I think it's worth offering some historical context for our yearlong medical nightmare. We need to hear from the people who for years have contended that certain types of virus experimentation might lead to a disastrous pandemic like this one. And we need to stop hunting for new exotic diseases in the wild, shipping them back to laboratories, and hot-wiring their genomes to prove how dangerous to human life they might become." [2021-01-04 15:00:28] [Robert Garry] This is very different than the message from a paper you'll all recognize: "So far, researchers have sampled little of the viral universe. Surveys of animals will undoubtedly result in the discovery of many thousands of new viruses. These data will benefit studies of diversity and evolution, and could tell us whether and why some pathogens might jump species boundaries more frequently than others. But, given the rarity of outbreaks and the complexity of host-pathogen interactions, it is arrogant to imagine that we could use such surveys to predict and mitigate the emergence of disease. New viruses will continue to emerge unexpectedly. There is a lot we can and must do to be better prepared." [2021-01-04 15:03:13] [Robert Garry] Seems to me it's really important to parse "Just STOP" from "do it better and smarter." [2021-01-04 16:51:05] [Kristian Andersen] I'm glad Alina is such a great expert on so many important topics - whether it be lab leak detection or whether people should sample from bats or not. She literally has decades of highly relevant experience in this space. [2021-01-04 16:52:31] [Kristian Andersen] A different start to that article could be "We're getting into contact with SARS-like coronaviruses all the time, and as we're encroaching on animal habitat, the risks of spillovers will continue to increase, SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2, and MERS-CoV being early warning signs of what to expect in future". There, much better. [2021-01-04 16:54:36] [Andrew Rambaut] Need to be especially careful about bat colliders