Slack / Private Message Drop — page 416

[2021-01-18 09:06:18] [Robert Garry] In some ways thou the fact that we're seem the same mutations popping up repeatedly is "reassuring" in the sense that it may not take a gazillion. [2021-01-18 09:10:58] [Robert Garry] Alina was clearly wrong on many levels when she stated "SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans." It's what lead her down the path that SC2 must be engineered or GOF. It's not that well adapted apparently because it keeps mutating. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1.full.pdf [2021-01-18 09:56:07] [Kristian Andersen] Yeah, we'll have to wait and see - maybe SC2 only has a narrow window for escaping (some level of) immunity, but I'm not convinced that's the case - we only need to look to all the ccCoVs. I warned Alina about her "well adapted to human" comments, making it clear that compared to SARS, yes, that might look to be the case, but there's a whole world of viruses out there where what we're seeing (dN/dS) in SC2 is nothing special. We're definitely seeing that play out now. [2021-01-18 10:14:31] [Kristian Andersen] https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/1351228542143651840?s=20 [2021-01-18 10:16:22] [Kristian Andersen] Starts ~40 mins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja_tLG8CLAc [2021-01-18 10:17:49] [Robert Garry] That's worse than expected. Much worse. [2021-01-18 10:26:32] [Kristian Andersen] [thread - ID: 2021-01-18 10:26:32] It's bad indeed - very bad. To me it's not unexpected though - the RSA lineage has multiple mutations that had already been shown to affect immunity, so I can't say I'm surprised (this is unlike b117 - that one has less mutations that seem related to escape). It's much worse than I could have _hoped_ for though. Add to this that I'm getting increasingly concerned that this is because Eek leads to general immune escape and isn't just linked to changing a simple B cell epitope. [2021-01-18 10:30:33] [Kristian Andersen] I like this Salim guy though - very very good. [2021-01-18 10:39:31] [Kristian Andersen] Salim Abdool Karim - holy smokes, such a good scientific communicator. Probably the best I have seen during the entire pandemic - I feel like an idiot I didn't know about him before watching this presentation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salim_Abdool_Karim [2021-01-18 10:42:26] [Robert Garry] Yes good - I chaired the study section that reviewed the last round of AIDS clinical trials groups grants a few months back. Karim and his wife clearly had the best application of the bunch. Not close.