Slack / Private Message Drop — page 6

[2020-05-01 16:25:57] [Eddie Holmes] Mine is very similar, although I probably have 30% bollocks bollocks and 10% bollocks scientists. [2020-05-01 16:27:33] [Kristian Andersen] I have another 50% bollocks bollocks coming in, but I ignore all of those, so don't need to spend too much time on it. Plus bollocks bollocks my assistant responds to while journalistic bollocks our comms department takes care of. Leaving only 80% of bollocks to deal with. [2020-05-01 16:28:56] [Eddie Holmes] Oh, I'm impressed/jealous - seems you have decent bollocks wall in place. I have to deal with all bollocks myself. [2020-05-01 16:30:08] [Kristian Andersen] Yeah, firewalls and bollockswalls were needed pretty quickly. Still need the wall though. Or not. [2020-05-01 16:30:47] [Kristian Andersen] Baric's paper IS really strange - I think he's just miffed because a bunch of amateurs came walking all over his turf. [2020-05-01 16:31:13] [Eddie Holmes] Exactly how I read it. [2020-05-01 16:32:01] [Kristian Andersen] I also had a pretty heated discussion with him on one of the WH committee calls where I mentioned that the RBD would probably lead to high affinity binding and the furin site being active. He essentially said that was all bullshit and I couldn't possibly know... Well. [2020-05-01 16:32:54] [Kristian Andersen] [this was early January] [2020-05-01 16:33:34] [Eddie Holmes] We actually did him a MASSIVE favour in writing that article. He would be really in the cross-hairs without it. [2020-05-01 16:34:20] [Kristian Andersen] No shit. In fact, one of his co-authors on the 2015 paper emailed me yesterday thanking us for the paper. He's just a grump - you know the type. [2020-05-01 16:34:49] [Eddie Holmes] Yes, I know the type. [2020-05-02 05:41:41] [Robert Garry] oppps...."One *Nature Medicine paper* further indicated that the pandemic virus shows no signs of having been engineered by scientists, another contention of conspiracy theorists. For one thing, although the researchers note that though the virus binds to a human cellular receptor to initiate an infection, that interaction is not optimal, "strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation," they write."