Can we do this Snowbird SnowbirdPatrol? I’ll volunteer.

Tis the season

Thanks to generous funding from the NIH/NHGRI, we will be sequencing the 4th generation of the CEPH/Utah pedigrees starting this year!

On the unprecedented natural experiment in human immunology and viral evolution that was the COVID pandemic, by Helen Branswell 🇨🇦
statnews.com/2024/03/28/cov… via STAT

Congratulations to Zackular lab postdoc, Dr. Marisa Egan, on her new position Swarthmore College!!! The Egan lab is going to do amazing things and I can’t imagine a better person to educate students on all things microbiology!

I normally sit this topic out, but I want to amplify this thread. This modeling is very similar to what I was doing in Jan and Feb 2020, and it’s how I knew then that the story of an outbreak starting from the market in Wuhan was consistent with everything we knew then and after.

Interesting thread (being written right now) that independently investigates the scenarios explored in Pekar22, using simulation code he wrote in-house + sampling under models that differ from what we used, but getting similar results

Pekar's simulations said that happens 3% of the time from a single introduction.

My code said it was also about 3%.

Those double lineage epidemics can be drawn like this:

idtdna.com/pages/tools/co…

Alta’s Mt. Superior cam shows nothing at all which means it must be absolutely hammering.

jm3rd Robin Ricket MD We ignore that threat at our peril. Wildlife farming, trade, and trafficking are huge business ($70 billion a year in China before Covid. . Pangolins are the most trafficked animal in the world, but not in trucks labeled 'Pangolin': jammed in lorries with other stressed animals

Remember that cryptic lineage from New Jersey with all the Spike mutations?

The Spike has a pretty dramatic phenotype when you transfect it. And these are cells with little to no ACE2 or TMPRSS2.

The Lab Leak Hypothesis™ isn't coherent or self-consistent enough to be described as a conspiracy theory. It's not one hypothesis, or one theory. It's a flexible collection of (often mutually incompatible) explanations that share support for a lab leak. 1/2🧵

4 yrs ago JHU brought in a security firm run by former FBI agents to analyze threats I received. Messages from one of these men rose to the top of their concern list. They weren't even about labs! I'm disheartened that this pattern of abusive behavior has continued w/o penalty.

A dozen #COVID19 scientists have filed a formal complaint with Rutgers University alleging that two faculty members violated the university’s policies by posting “provably false” comments that are often defamatory and that could incite harm against them. scim.ag/6f6

500!

alta.com/weather

If you’re having snow problems I feel bad for you son, we’ve got 499 inches and all we need is one (more)…

And little chute! High pressure 🙌🏻

Thank you Snowbird for opening Baldy Bowl to the top. Backpack would have helped but what a line