Slack / Private Message Drop — page 53

[2020-06-04 02:34:00] [Eddie Holmes] So tempting to delve into the madness but I declined. [2020-06-04 05:31:11] [Robert Garry] Jens should test the duck-mites... [2020-06-04 07:55:46] [Robert Garry] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloro quine more unhelpful stuff [2020-06-04 08:29:00] [Kristian Andersen] Aaaaaahahahahahaha aaaaaaaahahahahahahaha, I said we were going to be disappointed when we finally got a chance to see the actual paper, right? It's complete nonsense - I'll tell Tom. [2020-06-04 10:10:28] [Robert Garry] Oh my---"The logic of Occam's Razor leads us to the most elegant and robust explanation, which is that of retro-engineering of RaTG13 after the outbreak, ie during January-February 2020." *Ah ha - RatG13 was retro-engineered to cover of the cloning by the Red Army - that's brilliant!* "Like Pradhan _et al_, we note an uncanny similarity between unique inserts (circumscribed in red framed boxes above) in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1, the gp120 part of gp160 [3]." *CITING a withdrawn article may not be such a great idea.* "This implies that by employing insights gained after 2015, as just summarised, a further optimization of the 2015 chimeric virus for additional binding to bitter/sweet specific upper airway epithelia receptors is indicated. That would help to explain the otherwise puzzling extreme infectivity of Covid-19 and hence also help to explain the social epidemiology of its spread." *Love, art thou sweet? then bitter death must be: Love, thou art bitter; sweet is death to me. O Love, if death be sweeter, let me die. Tennyson And, so it ends:* "We do not ever want to read such sentences about any Covid-19 candidate vaccine." [2020-06-04 10:12:13] [Andrew Rambaut] They did a pretty shit job at retroengineering a supposed progenitor virus but I guess they were rushed. [2020-06-04 14:51:29] [Eddie Holmes] I think they have started retro-engineering RmYN02 as well but got bored half-way through and check in a recombination event to save time. [2020-06-04 14:58:06] [Eddie Holmes] It's the Plan 9 from Outer Space of virology papers [2020-06-04 15:49:28] [Kristian Andersen] This one was *significantly* worse than I had expected... It's been percolating with major news outlets for a fucking month - and it's complete junk!! [2020-06-04 15:59:51] [Eddie Holmes] I'm REALLY looking forward to it coming out though...will be so much fun to lampoon. So idiotic. [2020-06-04 17:17:06] [Andrew Rambaut]