Slack / Private Message Drop — page 37

one could only hope to maybe grow out a handful of viruses - what's the chance of out of that handful, one of them would be a super-charged pandemic virus? [2020-05-24 15:36:07] [Eddie Holmes] Yes, I agree. And surely you'd only grow a virus that you sequenced and likely published? [2020-05-24 15:37:39] [Kristian Andersen] Yes to the former, but not the latter - no, I don't think they would have published their sequences before also having grown it (however, somebody should have known about such a sequence if it existed and I'm pretty sure something would have been leaked by now) [2020-05-24 15:47:18] [Eddie Holmes] One that latter point, I am struck by the complete lack of intelligence on this: surely, if they were growing a virus in the lab, incident or not, there would be standard chatter about it on email, text, weichat, whatever, but there's nothing. There's a mountain of chatter about the pneumonia cases in Wuhan back in December before the disease was officially reported, but there is nothing about the lab. [2020-05-24 16:01:50] [Robert Garry] The virology is old-school - still grinding tissue and culturing I guess. Yeah - put that sample in a minus 80for 6 or 7 years and growing something out would be hit or miss at best. Which organ are you going to grind up? SARS viruses not so viremic (resisting temptation to evoke the idiot) so blood not a good bet. I remain curious about the 99% virus which I guess either never existed or was not - well - quite 99%. They clearly did culture something out of where-ever they got that one if the EMs are vaguely reflective of the quasi-reality. [2020-05-24 16:03:31] [Robert Garry] Different group I realize did the "99% virus" but they did culture something it appears. [2020-05-24 16:07:41] [Robert Garry] "CGTN is a propaganda organ for the Chinese government" Lot of that going around these days - I wonder if the 9 foot green spacewomen would be able to discern the difference with Fox Spews or any other Murdoch related garbage. [2020-05-25 10:10:53] [Kristian Andersen] [thread - ID: 2020-05-25 10:10:53] Sharing this in case there are any comments. His #1 caught my eye a little while back too, but I haven't looked into it further. ```Dr. AndersenI read with interest your paper titled, The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, in which you conclude this is a natural, zoonotic-sourced infection. Three different approaches of analysis that I have done do not support this conclusion. Can you comment please: 1. The furin cleavage site insert has the unusual codon usage for the RR dimer of CGG-CGG. As you probably know, the frequency of this codon usage in the SARS-CoV-2 genome is 0.09. So having two next to each other is not likely as a random event. As support for the unlikeliness of these codons, using GISAID data, by March there is evidence of the third G being mutated out for either A or T at three-times the rate of the background mutation rate, 26/year from Nextstrain.org. Since codon usage in coronaviruses are not greatly influenced by the host it resides in, this means a jump to humans must have been in a host which did not have even a few months history with the virus, otherwise the terminal G would have been purified out. On the other hand, most laboratory use optimized codon primers and kits use CGG routinely; including in primers in published papers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.