4 ms·

Ewan Birney (deputy directory of EMBL European Molecular Biology Laboratory)'s Twitter is a really good source of first class scientific information on this. Y

by robhu 6y ago

Ewan Birney (deputy directory of EMBL European Molecular Biology Laboratory)'s Twitter is a really good source of first class scientific information on this. You need to scroll back about 2 days to get the latest info (and he refers to the Twitter accounts of others in the field who can give more information). His Twitter profile is @ https://twitter.com/ewanbirney/ https://twitter.com/ewanbirney/ (Ewan is awesome - he is also (co)director of EMBL-EBI European Bioinformatics Institute, and I had the honour (as a Computer Scientist) of working there for nine years)

occamrazor 6y ago
Direct link to the thread where he explains why the evidence, although not conclusive, strongly supports a higher infectivity of the new variant: https://mobile.twitter.com/jcbarret/status/1340716901610172416 https://mobile.twitter.com/jcbarret/status/13407169016101724...
- maest 6y ago
  Are there any non-twitter sources available? I can't access that website. Also, I doubt twitter is the place where that information should live long-term anyway.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1340716901610172416.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1340716901610172416.html
  - jghn 6y ago
    I did see him mention on twitter the other day that he was going to be on a BBC segment talking about this, so there could be video archives on that front
  - _Microft 6y ago
    Try nitter, it's a fast alternative to reading Twitter content on Twitter itself. I modified the link above for you: https://nitter.net/jcbarret/status/1340716901610172416 https://nitter.net/jcbarret/status/1340716901610172416
- muxator 6y ago
  Visiting Hacker News with a text-mode browser (Links2, in this case) is so liberating! Twitter says that my browser is not supported (unsurprisingly enough). Well, I think I'll have to adapt to ditch a website that needs a shit-ton of JS to serve me a few KibiBytes of content.
- timr 6y ago
  This is a perfect example of mixing science and opinion, and we should be scolding "scientists" who do this without clarifying which is which, not lionizing them. The only definitively factual statement he makes is in the first tweet: "One of the key questions about the new variant (B.1.1.7) is whether there is conclusive evidence that it is more transmissible. I don't think we are absolutely certain yet" Everything else is speculation. He says that founder effect is not likely because the virus is spreading widely, nationwide: this is a hypothesis, not a statement of fact. He says that there are reasons to believe that the mutations are associated with structural regions known to be important to transmission: this is a hypothesis, not a statement of fact. He then says that because of these two unproven hypotheses (which he implicitly believes), one should "change your priors" on how likely it is that this strain is selectively advantaged. Certainly, one can "change their priors" based on personal opinion, but that doesn't mean that other informed scientists don't have different opinions. What this guy is doing is citing the (limited, non-definitive) evidence that we know, and then saying he has an opinion about what it all means. That doesn't make it factual. Without well-controlled cell-culture or animal studies that show that this strain is out-competing other strains in vivo, we don't have solid evidence either way. Trying to predict the organism-level impact of point mutations is a fun parlor game, but no more or less definitive than asking a sports fan which team is going to win on Sunday.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    I don't wish to veer into ad hominem arguments, but it is worth noting that the UK government must be very relieved to be able to associate the new lockdown rules with the new strain of the virus. By pointing to an unpredictable external factor they can justify the apparent U-turn in their policy, while also not having to point the finger at any potential voters who may not have been following the rules well enough. Whether the government's political needs have an effect on how scientists interpret or represent their findings is something I only have a hypothesis about.
  - m-ee 6y ago
    On TWiV they call it a SWAG, scientific wild ass guess
  - 6y ago
- jnxx 6y ago
  There is also this comment by Eric Feigl-Ding: https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1340913688992165888 https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1340913688992165888 > "14) “In the lab, Gupta’s group found that virus carrying the two mutations was less susceptible to convalescent plasma from several donors than the wildtype (common strain) virus. That suggests it can evade antibodies targeting the wildtype virus”!!" Could that mean that the "herd immunity strategy" by letting relatively healthy people being infected by the virus might fail utterly because the immunity they acquire does not help very much against the new variant?
kodah 6y ago
I realize that this is probably an unpopular opinion among techies but I really wish people would post information on a website and then link to it from Twitter. At the very least, double post it. I don't use Twitter and actively block it and Facebook's various websites from my router and VPN. Additionally, reading long threads on Twitter or back and forth replies for a non-regular Twitter user is taxing.
- vanpythonista 6y ago
  https://threadreaderapp.com/ https://threadreaderapp.com/ is a popular choice that allows you to combine a tweet thread into a single page.
pmoriarty 6y ago
In the latest episode of This Week in Virology[1] five virologists discuss this issue. Some points they made: "It's a variant. It's not a strain. A strain is a virus with a new biological property. There have been no new properties ascribed to this isolate other than sequence differences, which is not enough to make a strain.. nor have we seen any other new strains of SARS-CoV-2 that anybody's demonstrated to be biologically different. None. It hasn't happened yet. I'm not saying it couldn't but it hasn't." "Nobody's done any experiments to determine the effects of these changes on any property of the virus. Yet when a journalist calls up a scientist and say "What do you think?" and the scientist says "These could have an effect on virulence or transmission or antibody neutralization," somehow that gets translated in to "It's making the virus more virulent" and that's what's circulated and a dozen people this week said to me "What do you think about these mutations in the UK that make the virus more virulent, more transmissible, more resistant to neutralization by antibodies?" None of that has been shown, folks! It's speculation. There's no paper on any of this." [1] - Starting at about 54 minutes in to episode 696: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-696/ https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-696/
- Guthur 6y ago
  I hope we look back critically at mainstream media role in all aspects of covid analyse and reactions. Commercial news media is so far from critical analysis that it's dangerous that we allow it anywhere near our decision making processes.
- Exmoor 6y ago
  >Yet when a journalist calls up a scientist and say "What do you think?" and the scientist says "These could have an effect on virulence or transmission or antibody neutralization," somehow that gets translated in to "It's making the virus more virulent" This has been an incredibly large issue for almost a year now and it's ridiculous. Journalists not understanding the way scientists speak was vaguely understandable ten months ago, but after a year straight of science being the number one news maker in the world it's obvious that the media is just use it as an excuse to scare-monger and increase their clicks. Literally every day in the last few weeks I've had to explain to someone that vaccines will almost certainly have a profound impact on if people can transmit the virus because the news articles keep taking the "We don't have data yet on how it impacts transmission" and reporting that as the worst case scenario, when in all likelihood it will profoundly diminish people's ability to transmit the virus.

by robhu 6y ago

occamrazor 6y ago

Direct link to the thread where he explains why the evidence, although not conclusive, strongly supports a higher infectivity of the new variant: https://mobile.twitter.com/jcbarret/status/1340716901610172416 https://mobile.twitter.com/jcbarret/status/13407169016101724...

maest 6y ago
Are there any non-twitter sources available? I can't access that website. Also, I doubt twitter is the place where that information should live long-term anyway.
- iso1631 6y ago
  https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1340716901610172416.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1340716901610172416.html
- jghn 6y ago
  I did see him mention on twitter the other day that he was going to be on a BBC segment talking about this, so there could be video archives on that front
- _Microft 6y ago
  Try nitter, it's a fast alternative to reading Twitter content on Twitter itself. I modified the link above for you: https://nitter.net/jcbarret/status/1340716901610172416 https://nitter.net/jcbarret/status/1340716901610172416
muxator 6y ago
Visiting Hacker News with a text-mode browser (Links2, in this case) is so liberating! Twitter says that my browser is not supported (unsurprisingly enough). Well, I think I'll have to adapt to ditch a website that needs a shit-ton of JS to serve me a few KibiBytes of content.
timr 6y ago
This is a perfect example of mixing science and opinion, and we should be scolding "scientists" who do this without clarifying which is which, not lionizing them. The only definitively factual statement he makes is in the first tweet: "One of the key questions about the new variant (B.1.1.7) is whether there is conclusive evidence that it is more transmissible. I don't think we are absolutely certain yet" Everything else is speculation. He says that founder effect is not likely because the virus is spreading widely, nationwide: this is a hypothesis, not a statement of fact. He says that there are reasons to believe that the mutations are associated with structural regions known to be important to transmission: this is a hypothesis, not a statement of fact. He then says that because of these two unproven hypotheses (which he implicitly believes), one should "change your priors" on how likely it is that this strain is selectively advantaged. Certainly, one can "change their priors" based on personal opinion, but that doesn't mean that other informed scientists don't have different opinions. What this guy is doing is citing the (limited, non-definitive) evidence that we know, and then saying he has an opinion about what it all means. That doesn't make it factual. Without well-controlled cell-culture or animal studies that show that this strain is out-competing other strains in vivo, we don't have solid evidence either way. Trying to predict the organism-level impact of point mutations is a fun parlor game, but no more or less definitive than asking a sports fan which team is going to win on Sunday.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  I don't wish to veer into ad hominem arguments, but it is worth noting that the UK government must be very relieved to be able to associate the new lockdown rules with the new strain of the virus. By pointing to an unpredictable external factor they can justify the apparent U-turn in their policy, while also not having to point the finger at any potential voters who may not have been following the rules well enough. Whether the government's political needs have an effect on how scientists interpret or represent their findings is something I only have a hypothesis about.
- m-ee 6y ago
  On TWiV they call it a SWAG, scientific wild ass guess
- 6y ago
jnxx 6y ago
There is also this comment by Eric Feigl-Ding: https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1340913688992165888 https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1340913688992165888 > "14) “In the lab, Gupta’s group found that virus carrying the two mutations was less susceptible to convalescent plasma from several donors than the wildtype (common strain) virus. That suggests it can evade antibodies targeting the wildtype virus”!!" Could that mean that the "herd immunity strategy" by letting relatively healthy people being infected by the virus might fail utterly because the immunity they acquire does not help very much against the new variant?

kodah 6y ago

I realize that this is probably an unpopular opinion among techies but I really wish people would post information on a website and then link to it from Twitter. At the very least, double post it. I don't use Twitter and actively block it and Facebook's various websites from my router and VPN. Additionally, reading long threads on Twitter or back and forth replies for a non-regular Twitter user is taxing.

vanpythonista 6y ago
https://threadreaderapp.com/ https://threadreaderapp.com/ is a popular choice that allows you to combine a tweet thread into a single page.

pmoriarty 6y ago

In the latest episode of This Week in Virology[1] five virologists discuss this issue. Some points they made: "It's a variant. It's not a strain. A strain is a virus with a new biological property. There have been no new properties ascribed to this isolate other than sequence differences, which is not enough to make a strain.. nor have we seen any other new strains of SARS-CoV-2 that anybody's demonstrated to be biologically different. None. It hasn't happened yet. I'm not saying it couldn't but it hasn't." "Nobody's done any experiments to determine the effects of these changes on any property of the virus. Yet when a journalist calls up a scientist and say "What do you think?" and the scientist says "These could have an effect on virulence or transmission or antibody neutralization," somehow that gets translated in to "It's making the virus more virulent" and that's what's circulated and a dozen people this week said to me "What do you think about these mutations in the UK that make the virus more virulent, more transmissible, more resistant to neutralization by antibodies?" None of that has been shown, folks! It's speculation. There's no paper on any of this." [1] - Starting at about 54 minutes in to episode 696: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-696/ https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-696/

Guthur 6y ago
I hope we look back critically at mainstream media role in all aspects of covid analyse and reactions. Commercial news media is so far from critical analysis that it's dangerous that we allow it anywhere near our decision making processes.
Exmoor 6y ago
>Yet when a journalist calls up a scientist and say "What do you think?" and the scientist says "These could have an effect on virulence or transmission or antibody neutralization," somehow that gets translated in to "It's making the virus more virulent" This has been an incredibly large issue for almost a year now and it's ridiculous. Journalists not understanding the way scientists speak was vaguely understandable ten months ago, but after a year straight of science being the number one news maker in the world it's obvious that the media is just use it as an excuse to scare-monger and increase their clicks. Literally every day in the last few weeks I've had to explain to someone that vaccines will almost certainly have a profound impact on if people can transmit the virus because the news articles keep taking the "We don't have data yet on how it impacts transmission" and reporting that as the worst case scenario, when in all likelihood it will profoundly diminish people's ability to transmit the virus.