Slack / Private Message Drop — page 791

accidental lab escape idea has no such selection - samples are collected from bats over a limited time period and limited geographical area • SARS1 also associated with animal market • The closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 is not from the WIV: i.e. it's not RaTG13 because sequence similarity varies so much across the genome because of recombination. RpYN06 is closest in most genes. • No mention of SARS-CoV-2 in old theses from WIV, including from 2019. https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1392575191763472388?s=20 [2021-05-12 23:18:12] [Kristian Andersen] Yeah, not arguments - just speculations from him. I think it's worth engaging - clearly they haven't really thought that hard about it. Probably also worth having a little cheat-list of direct evidence for natural emergence because I see this coming up more and more. The only thing we're missing is an intermediate host - that may or may exist - or even existed. [2021-05-12 23:19:18] [Eddie Holmes] Let's sleep on it an do it carefully [2021-05-12 23:21:43] [Andrew Rambaut] You don't really need to get into the individual arguments I think - just address the non equivalence of saying there is no evidence for either hypothesis - one has a prior probability that is vanishingly small so requires at least some evidence the natural hypothesis is everything else. [2021-05-12 23:22:19] [Kristian Andersen] Yeah, but the prior doesn't work with them because, Wuhan. [2021-05-12 23:22:54] [Eddie Holmes] I would add: 1. Long evolutionary gap to Yunnan bats. 2. Yunnan bats look close because they mainly sampled Yunnan bats. 3. Two lineages in Wuhan at different markets. 4. No reason not a publish a closer virus before the pandemic. [2021-05-12 23:23:42] [Andrew Rambaut] I love this one: > --Closest known (not that close) viral relatives in nature are ~1000 miles from Wuhan So the known relatives are not the close relatives and thus the fact they are far away is expected. [2021-05-12 23:24:40] [Kristian Andersen] Andrew you nailed that one way back - Ebola virus in West Africa... [2021-05-12 23:24:53] [Andrew Rambaut] > To call this scenario a "conspiracy theory" is inappropriate and unfair to everyone involved. [2021-05-12 23:25:20] [Eddie Holmes] Send them this to explain the point: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiKyfd6hA0 [2021-05-12 23:26:56] [Andrew Rambaut]