Thread by @DavidCranmerUn1

Dissecting the early COVID-19 cases in Wuhan

Thanks to four anonymous reviewers and to A. Crits-Christoph, E. Holmes, D. Robertson, J. Wertheim, J. Pekar, K. Andersen, S. Goldstein, A. Rambaut, H. Mourant, D. Yang, L. Wang, S. Chen, C. Di, and Q. Jiang science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

for assistance and discussions. The author is supported by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation is a private foundation that provides grants to not-for-profit organizations. It was created in

1964 by David Packard (co-founder of HP) and his wife Lucile Salter Packard.

David Packard (/ˈpækərd/ PAK-ərd; September 7, 1912 – March 26, 1996) was an American electrical engineer and co-founder, with Bill Hewlett, of Hewlett-Packard (1939), serving as president (1947–64),

CEO (1964–68), and Chairman of the Board (1964–68, 1972–93) of HP. He served as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1969 to 1971 during the Nixon administration. Packard served as President of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU) from 1976 to 1981 and

chairman of its Board of Regents from 1973 to 1982. He was a member of the Trilateral Commission.

Upon entering office in 1969, President Richard M. Nixon appointed Packard U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense under Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird.

Melvin Robert Laird (September 1, 1922 – November 16, 2016) was an American politician, writer and statesman. He was a U.S. congressman from Wisconsin from 1953 to 1969 before serving as Secretary of Defense from 1969 to 1973 under President Richard Nixon. Laird was

instrumental in forming the administration's policy of withdrawing U.S. soldiers from the Vietnam War; he coined the expression "Vietnamization," referring to the process of transferring more responsibility for combat to the South Vietnamese forces.

Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird with President Richard Nixon and General Alexander Haig and Secretary of State William P. Rogers and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger at The Oval Office in The White House, Washington, D.C. January 4, 1974.

Laird did not shrink from centralized management where he found it useful or warranted. His tenure saw the establishment of the Defense Investigative Service, the Defense Mapping Agency, the Office of Net Assessment, and the Defense Security Assistance Agency (to administer all

DoD military assistance programs).

Andrew Marshall was named its first director, a position he continued to hold under succeeding administrations.

After electing to defer his studies in favor of eventually pursuing a Ph.D. in statistics (a program not yet offered by the

University of Chicago), Marshall joined the RAND Corporation, the original "think tank," at the behest of mentor W. Allen Wallis in 1949. While he would briefly return to academia to cover Wallis's courses during the 1953-1954 term and continued to take statistics courses at

George Washington University, Marshall soon gained the cachet of being part of "a cadre of strategic thinkers" that coalesced at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s and 1960s, a group that also included Charles J. Hitch, Herman Kahn, James Schlesinger and Daniel Ellsberg. Notably,

he worked with Kahn on developing and advancing Monte Carlo methods.

Andrew Marshall was consulted for the 1992 draft of Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), created by then-Defense Department staffers I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Zalmay Khalilzad; all of whom took

to influential roles in the administration of George W. Bush.

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, among others, have been cited as Marshall "star protégés."