The story of how the first SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence came to be released to the world continues to be unclear.

The new book by Jeremy Farrar tells a different side of the story.

“So much of science is about ego, for me as well. Who doesn’t want the first paper?” - Ed Holmes
According to the book, Holmes had seen signs that the Chinese government had obtained the full genome by Dec 27, 2019.

By Jan 4, 2020, Sinopharm had begun manufacturing a covid vaccine. (Human-to-human transmission only confirmed on Jan 20, 2020.)
An unscripted answer from Holmes as to why the genome release was delayed even after Genbank had finished processing it in early January 2020.
Why does it matter how the virus genome sequence was handled by scientists, scientific journals, and the government in the early days?

Because the genome is key to the development of diagnostics, vaccines, therapeutics, and understanding how much of a threat the pathogen may be.
What seems consistent across interviews and accounts:

1. By end of 1st week Jan 2020, multiple scientist groups had the SARS2 genome.

2. They were told not to share it with the public and they largely obeyed.

3. Pressure began to mount online for the genome to be released.
Farrar himself tweeted this on Jan 10, 2020 (9:50am EST, early afternoon UK, early hours of Jan 11 Australia):
Within 12 hours, Holmes had posted the genome to Virological.
The story behind this tweet is detailed in Farrar's book. "Within minutes, the tweets attracted a private message on Twitter and a phone call from the other side of the world."
Strangely, the timeline in the book is also jumbled or could at least benefit from some clarification. Because Farrar writes that, prior to his Jan 10 tweet, he and Holmes had already been calling each other and planning on how to get Chinese scientists to disclose outbreak info.
Although Holmes was on the Nature paper with Zhang Yongzhen, he did not have access to the SARS-CoV-2 genome even after the manuscript had been submitted for peer review, and even after GenBank had processed it.
In Holmes' words, "I helped [Zhang] work out what it meant" without having seen the genome sequence.
smh.com.au/national/nsw/v…
Interview from Jan 2021:
“"It was weighing on my conscience." In Sydney, it was early on 11 January when Prof Holmes phoned his colleague in China and asked his permission to publish the sequence.”
bbc.com/news/science-e…

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More from @Ayjchan

25 Jul
Leaders have to come up with a new protocol for emerging diseases: how scientists communicate vital info to the WHO and the public (important!), how peer reviewed confidentiality should be waived in these crises, and how to keep these systems accountable. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9…
What I’m worried about is that this pandemic will drive leaders and scientists in the opposite direction towards less transparency.

What if more scientists start using Protonmail, Signal, and burner phones for future communications regarding emergencies?
The recent FOIAs revealing highly confidential conversations (or redactions) are likely to cause more people to shift to secure, non-FOI’able channels.

If so, this may be the one of the last pandemics/outbreaks we can shed much light on via FOIA.
Read 5 tweets
24 Jul
An interview of Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance from a year ago:

"Daszak says that around 16,000 bats have been sampled and around 100 new SARS-like viruses discovered."

May we please see the data concerning these 100 new SARS-like viruses discovered?
economist.com/science-and-te…
Very next sentence: "In particular, some bats found in China are now known to harbour coronaviruses that seem pre-adapted to infect people."

Did another top expert in the field use the word "pre-adapted"?
We know that not all of these novel SARSrCoVs (and their sequences) are in the public domain.

Even the most recently published RaTG15 was collected in 2015.
Read 5 tweets
23 Jul
This statement by Ian Lipkin in @BulletinAtomic imo is not correct:

"features of SARS-CoV-2... could not have been predicted even had someone wanted to engineer a highly transmissible and pathogenic coronavirus"

It assumes we know what other people know.
thebulletin.org/2021/07/the-kn…
@BulletinAtomic Once we acknowledge that we don't know what other scientists know and have in their toolkit, then we can acknowledge that it is not possible to predict what they would engineer, regardless of intent.
@BulletinAtomic If we can access their databases, lab records, theses (including those that are classified), interview lab personnel under confidential conditions, provide a robust whistleblower channel, then we can talk about knowing what other scientists knew in 2019.
Read 5 tweets
22 Jul
New book by the director of Wellcome Trust. @ianbirrell notes that it does not describe the story of the Daszak-orchestrated Lancet letter to "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin".
#OriginsOfCovid
unherd.com/2021/07/how-sc…
@ianbirrell The book reveals how several top experts in virology and infectious diseases had initially pegged the lab leak hypothesis as the most likely scenario. Ed Holmes was “80% sure this thing had come out of a lab”. Kristian Andersen 60-70%; Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry not far behind.
Even after the Feb 1 call among international experts, Jeremy Farrar said “On a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release I am honestly at 50... My guess is this will remain grey unless there is access to the Wuhan lab — and I suspect that is unlikely.”
Read 15 tweets
21 Jul
I want to counter the specific idea that the US was secretly outsourcing and funding gain-of-function research while it had been "banned" in the US.

The work was not banned; similar work was and continues to be funded and done by the US & other countries.
Read 9 tweets
20 Jul
Just listened to this terrific podcast interview on the #OriginsOfCovid of @KatherineEban @VanityFair by @PeterAttiaMD

Like Eban says, it's one of these stories where you feel like you can't even make this stuff up.
peterattiamd.com/katherineeban2/
@KatherineEban @VanityFair @PeterAttiaMD There's a good discussion in the podcast about the difficulty of finding out who are the few people who know the origin of the virus (have evidence of it) and why finding a whistleblower may take decades or maybe even never. Related story:
I agree with @KatherineEban that the most credible sources on the #OriginsOfCovid are those that are asking for a proper investigation of plausible hypotheses, not the people on either side who insist that the virus is almost certainly natural or almost certainly from a lab.
Read 10 tweets

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