Slack / Private Message Drop — page 743

[2021-05-02 07:13:38] [Robert Garry] "hapless assignment of blame." Zero sense of irony. [2021-05-02 07:41:23] [Robert Garry] That's a lot of space dust: https://wgno.com/news/5200-tons-of-cosmic-dust-fall-to-earth-each-year/ [2021-05-02 07:47:31] [Kristian Andersen] I like to think of it as planet farts. [2021-05-03 05:12:23] [Robert Garry] THIS IS NOT PRETTY: Nicholas Wade: https://medium.com/@nwade_44486/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038 [2021-05-03 05:14:04] [Robert Garry] "The Daszak and Andersen letters were really political, not scientific statements, yet were amazingly effective." [2021-05-03 05:15:25] [Robert Garry] "And that's it. These are the two arguments made by the Andersen group in support of their declaration that the SARS2 virus was clearly not manipulated. And this conclusion, grounded in nothing but two inconclusive speculations, convinced the world's press that SARS2 could not have escaped from a lab. A technical critique of the Andersen letter takes it down in harsher words." [2021-05-03 05:16:50] [Robert Garry] "A second statement which had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter. Kristian G. Andersen, Scripps Research Unfortunately this was another case of poor science, in the sense defined above." [2021-05-03 05:35:24] [Robert Garry] Yes - this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Wade calling us out for poor science. [2021-05-03 05:39:36] [Robert Garry] Based on the length of this Medium piece this asshole appears to be about to vomit out another thinly veiled racist tome "based" on a piss poor understanding of genetics. [2021-05-03 08:26:25] [Kristian Andersen] Jon Cohen just emailed me about it, asking if I was "going to respond". It's laughable - in fact, Wade reached out to me a while back with some questions and I decided not to answer them because "Yeah, he's obviously a big shot, but the questions are just dumb. I'd have to explain all of evolution to him and not just his sub-questions". Just take a look at the questions he emailed over... [shared file(s): Screen Shot 2021-05-03 at 8.25.23 AM.png] [2021-05-03 08:29:06]