Slack / Private Message Drop — page 410

Just came in to look at the pango sequence EPI_ISL_610156 Manis pentadactyla mentioned in the new virological post - important that it's there for the reasons mentioned in the excellence post fromm Lytras et al. unfortunately a lot of missing sequence so not much use for comparison at least in spike. "The key, and urgent question to minimise future spillovers, is thus *not*, how did SARS-CoV-2 get from Yunnan to Hubei, but rather which bat or other Chinese animal species are harbouring nCoV _Sarbecoviruses_?" [2021-01-16 10:01:51] [Robert Garry] Here's the article FWIW. Really fair and balanced in a Fox news kinda way... [shared file(s): The World Needs a Real Investigation Into the Origins of Covid-19 - WSJ.pdf] [2021-01-16 11:01:00] [Robert Garry] Oh Jesse... [shared file(s): image.png] [2021-01-16 11:06:10] [Kristian Andersen] It's a hopelessly naive statement. [2021-01-16 11:07:20] [Robert Garry] https://mbio.asm.org/content/6/4/e01013-15 The types of lab release scenarios that Chan is describing aren't close to what happened in 1977 H1N1. [2021-01-16 11:10:44] [Kristian Andersen] Correct. But what's most important here - and I have mentioned this to Jesse - you can't just look at flu pandemics - you need to look at emergence events. How many natural emergence events are there vs those linked to the lab? [2021-01-16 11:12:51] [Kristian Andersen] It's misleading and inappropriate for people like Jesse to make these statements - it makes it sound as if our prior probability of lab escape would be 0.2. It's many orders of magnitude lower than that. Sure, the fact that WIV was/is doing work on SARS-like CoVs elevates that prior probability (but a lot), but it still gets it nowhere near the "50/50" scenario Jesse is talking about. He of all people should know that. [2021-01-16 11:15:15] [Kristian Andersen] All these folks are stuck in their inappropriate priors and not updating them based on data. It's rather sad, really. [2021-01-16 11:22:57] [Robert Garry] If Shi would have had a virus closer to RaTG13 she damn well would have reported it in her Nature paper. That simple fact precludes any nefarious engineering BS. All that's left for "lab escape," which we have all acknowledged is a remote possibility is that some Dingleberry (?) working on samples in lab brought in from the wild the inadvertently infected herself with the 99+% progenitor to SC2 that they then didn't bother to characterize. [2021-01-16 11:31:52] [Kristian Andersen] Yup, that's it. Not impossible, just not very likely given the other possible scenarios. [2021-01-16 13:04:59] [Robert Garry] https://www.myarklamiss.com/lifestyle/health/coronavirus/ldh-confirms-first-covid-19-variant-in-louisiana/ [2021-01-16 13:17:41]