Slack / Private Message Drop — page 498

True. I ain't going back to China. [2021-02-07 23:59:12] [Andrew Rambaut] Didn't you get the nice invite from Cara at the "North American Foundation for Science and Technology"? [2021-02-08 01:03:57] [Robert Garry] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6512/20.full I came across this article on LinFa. Herein a clue as to what may be [note: actually should be] going on: "This is an extremely interesting approach," says Isabella Eckerle, a virologist at the Centre for Emerging Viral Diseases at the University of Geneva. Eckerle and colleagues *validated the test for WHO* and published the result as a preprint in late September. "Especially for screening potential plasma donors or when *looking for the animal reservoir* it should be really useful." IIRC LinFa told Eddie he had some positive pangolins - this is the assay he likely used for the serology. Bottom line: WHO has LinFa's assay and may be trying to get their hands on the samples from the Market. Argy Bargy? [2021-02-08 01:18:48] [Eddie Holmes] Ha, good spot! Must be what Linfa used in the pangolins, although I assumed they were Thai pangolins as the bat virus in that paper is from Thailand. Not sure that Linfa would have gotten Wuhan samples but who knows. Yi Guan went to the market straight away as well. All very curious. [2021-02-08 05:11:47] [Robert Garry] I'm thinking that none of the WHO team want to come off as "working for the CCP" either. IF I had been picked and agreed that would be my greatest "fear." Hence they need something to show they are really investigating. That's where LinFa's assay that WHO has shown GREAT interest in comes into play. I could be wrong but I am guessing that's gonna come up at the presser tomorrow. [2021-02-08 05:34:47] [Andrew Rambaut] My thought is whether the initial samples came up as SARS and they quite reasonably cleared the market. They would have taken samples from the animals (it is inconceivable they wouldn't). What maybe went wrong is that the animal samples came up negative. This is when they they realised it wasn't just animal exposure and it was circulating. So they suppressed the negative results (much easier than positive results). Then they got the environmental samples which presumably were just the result of the human cases and that was the best they could do. [2021-02-08 06:24:00] [Robert Garry] Agree with all of this...will be interesting what the presser says tomorrow... [2021-02-08 11:36:30] [Eddie Holmes] Yup, could be. Just got another invite from Cara...how timely [2021-02-08 12:15:43] [Andrew Rambaut] Just spotted this on BBC [shared file(s): Image from iOS.jpg] [2021-02-08 12:16:17] [Andrew Rambaut] The sinister puppet master in the shadows [2021-02-08 12:16:46] [Kristian Andersen] Old news man, old news.