Slack / Private Message Drop — page 795

Again, all of the above is entirely circumstantial. I would never hang my hat on any of it. You have written a commentary in PNAS and now in Science based on this circumstantial evidence. But same thing with data in support of a natural spillover, revealing shipments of risky wildlife samples across China, into Wuhan markets, and around the world, as well as the incredible seen and unseen diversity of coronaviruses in nature. All circumstantial. We each may view these observations and arrive at different likelihoods of one hypothesis versus another. But I really don't think that guesses at likelihoods help right now all that much. [2021-05-13 12:04:08] [Kristian Andersen] He also sets up a false balance between Wade and myself - my Twitter thread wasn't merely a "On the other side" - it destroys his argument with actual data. [2021-05-13 12:14:12] [Robert Garry] Opens the door for a counter letter or tech comment. _I for one would like to see @Andrew Rambaut math in print. [2021-05-13 12:19:09] [Kristian Andersen] Same... [2021-05-13 12:24:57] [Andrew Rambaut] The lab escape idea is not a scientific hypothesis - it is an allegation. It can't be investigated by scientific methods because were it true it would also imply a cover-up which by definition is to avoid discovery. [2021-05-13 12:27:48] [Kristian Andersen] Let's put a Science logo on that and we're done :wink:. [2021-05-13 12:30:29] [Andrew Rambaut] I am not sure about presenting the maths up front but we can use it to hone our arguments. The point is that collecting samples have no way of enriching for human transmissible viruses so they have one in a million shot of finding one. Carnivores are act like a filter - selecting at source for transmissible viruses. [2021-05-13 12:47:32] [Robert Garry] WHO and PD noticed... [shared file(s): image.png] [2021-05-13 12:47:39] [Andrew Rambaut] The editor of science is inviting a scientific 'debate' in his mag. Why don't we see if Nature is interested in a commentary written as a sub-tweet [2021-05-13 12:58:55] [Kristian Andersen] Should we consider it? We can get Angie involved and I'm sure we could get a good list of people to sign - but we should focus on people with _actual_ experience and not ivory tower academics. Andrew, you have by far the clearest voice here... [2021-05-13 13:01:29] [Robert Garry]