Slack / Private Message Drop — page 781

research. I'm a bit sick of the 'independent oversight' and 'broad expertise' jibes also." [2021-05-11 17:08:40] [Kristian Andersen] 100% spot on. [2021-05-11 17:10:43] [Eddie Holmes] Pretty extraordinary that Science are letting this through. [2021-05-11 17:11:19] [Kristian Andersen] [thread - ID: 2021-05-11 17:11:19] Honestly, it's embarrassing - "as scientists with relevant experience". Lol. [2021-05-11 20:03:07] [Kristian Andersen] Planning on putting another nail in the Wade coffin later this week to take down his argument about "2) Natural history and evolution" (it's so dumb it hurts...). Anyway, I came across our previous conversation about pango CoVs binding better to human cells - turns out that work is actually on the bioRxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.22.436468v1. Very very interesting stuff - kinda freaky. [2021-05-11 20:17:37] [Eddie Holmes] I remember this. Plus the virus does so well in other animals. Huge outbreaks in mink with no adaptive burn-in. It's a true generalist. [2021-05-11 20:23:11] [Kristian Andersen] Yup - I'll be making a few points about that... And cats. And mice. And chimps. And dogs. And tigers. I'm also very much looking forward to using Andrew's Mother of All Root to Tip Plots to show exactly how well-adapted SARS-CoV-2 was when it jumped into humans... [2021-05-11 21:26:57] [Eddie Holmes] As an aside, if you look at the gamey tastes figure you will see that some of the pangolins sold as food were sick. We've just done some SRA mining and found that the found the famous data produced by Liu et al. in that Viruses papers of 2019 also contains a pestivirus. And you wonder why disease emergence events happen. [2021-05-11 21:43:16] [Kristian Andersen] [thread - ID: 2021-05-11 21:43:16] As an aside - trying to dig into papers eDim and others describe as gain-of-function / GOF at WIV. This seems to be the main (only?) one: https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698. VERY clearly not GOF as defined here (they don't do serial passage, they don't create the chimeric viruses to be "better pathogens", they're not SARS, MERS, or flu, etc., etc. - and the chimeric viruses actually bind worse to human receptors than wildtype): https://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/documents/gain-of-function.pdf https://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/documents/p3co.pdf It's total BS. Just FYI since this might come up in random conversation...