Thread by @bopinion

One of the bizarre subplots of Trump’s illness has been the White House’s unwillingness to explore a simple question:

Exactly how did the president of the United States contract Covid-19? trib.al/2zvKDoR

Offers by the CDC to investigate the outbreak have been rebuffed, leaving many unknowns:

➡️Who gave him the virus?
➡️Where did it happen?
➡️To whom did he give it?
➡️In what circumstances?
➡️Is the disease from a single source?
➡️If so, who's the source? trib.al/2zvKDoR

20 years ago it would have been all but impossible to answer these questions, but they can now be answered quickly and cheaply, making Michael Lewis wonder why we don’t already have answers.

He sat down to discuss the topic with microbiologist Joe DeRisi trib.al/2zvKDoR

When you test positive you can also extract the actual genetic program of the virus.

The virus is made of RNA, and when it replicates itself, it tends to make errors, so you can see it changing as it moves through the population trib.al/2zvKDoR

From generation to generation, the virus introduces small mutations. It does this at about a rate of a new mutation every two to three transmission events.

You have a bread crumb trail that links all the viruses together throughout their history trib.al/2zvKDoR

If we had all the positive cases from:

🇺🇸The White House
🇺🇸Members of Congress
🇺🇸Friends and family

The viral genome from those could be sequenced and could probably create a linkage map that indicates who likely gave it to whom trib.al/2zvKDoR

Is it an invasion of privacy to sequence viral genomes? Since it's RNA, no one owns it:

🦠You don’t own it
🦠Trump doesn’t own it
🦠It’s part of nature

In fact, after you clear it from your system, it won't be in your body anymore trib.al/2zvKDoR

Are there any kind of legal impediments to getting the positive samples from in and around the White House and sequencing them?

To microbiologist Joe DeRisi’s knowledge, there shouldn’t be since we’re not violating protected personal health information trib.al/2zvKDoR

Take Hope Hicks and Donald Trump. Hypothetically, how would we be able to figure out the path of the virus?

If they have an identical virus, if it hasn’t mutated, you couldn’t really tell whether Trump gave it to Hicks or Hicks gave it to Trump trib.al/2zvKDoR

Now, if the president had one extra mutation on top of all the mutations that were in Hope Hicks’s viral genome, you would know that he was downstream of Hope Hicks.

And you could sequence them in time — Hope Hicks first, then the president trib.al/2zvKDoR

If we were able to sequence all the positive cases, we could link the transmission events:

📢A rally
🚪A closed office
🌹A Rose Garden event
✈️Air Force One

Once we know the situations in which the virus is transmitted, we can intervene to stop it trib.al/2zvKDoR

It’s quite striking that not only does the White House not appear to be making any use of the genomic sequencing to understand how this occurred, but they're not even doing basic contact tracing trib.al/2zvKDoR