Post Emergence - The Cover-up

Dec 15: Ian Lipkin, WHO adviser, 16:44: I first heard about this outbreak on the 15th Dec from Lu Jia-hai. Lu, who's a professor at Sun Yat-sen university who runs a large One-Health program - we have a program with Prof Lu - it’s been funded for about 6 months by the Chinese Government but doesn’t really have any support in the US - and I‘d like to talk a little bit about that program - it’s called Gideon - it’s this Global Infectious Disease Epidemiology Network … (Yeah, not now Ian - we’re compiling a timeline - maybe later)

Dec 30: BBC: Li Wenliang .. sent a message to fellow doctors in a chat group warning them to wear protective clothing to avoid infection.

Dec 30, 7pm: The mysterious patient samples arrived at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at 7 P.M. on Dec 30, 2019. 

Dec 30, 7:03: Moments later Shi Zhengli’s cell phone rang. It was her boss, the institute’s director. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention had detected a novel coronavirus in two hospital patients with atypical pneumonia, and it wanted Shi’s renowned laboratory to investigate.  

Director: Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now

Shi does.  But it’s too late for the bullet train

9:02 pm: Train Z27, Shanghai to Wuhan, first available: 9h34m travel time.  

Shi, on the train: I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong. I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China. Could they have come from our lab?

(Virus Hunter  - frequent Batman collaborator - who is Bat Lady’s colleague-in-arms - knew about it by at least Dec 15 - but Bat Lady’s Bat-phone doesn’t ring until Dec 30, 7:03 pm? 

Dec 30: Drastic (PDF p6): New version of the database factsheet was uploaded at the time Pr. Shi Zhengli was on the Shanghai to Wuhan high speed night train.

Dec 31: Chinese government started to censor .. “Unknown Wuhan Pneumonia” and “Wuhan Seafood Market” on YY, a Chinese live-streaming platform.

alerts WHO to unusual pneumonia in Wuhan.

Dec 31: Taiwanese health experts warn WHO about human-to-human transmission. The warning is ignored. (Two weeks later WHO is still insisting there's no evidence. When the clamour grows in Taiwan, a free country, Tedros accuses the Taiwanese of being racist.)

Jan 3:  Nature: Prof Zhang Yongzhen’ss laboratory at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center received a sample of the pathogen on 3 January. 

On the same day, the Chinese government circulated an order forbidding local authorities and labs from publishing information about the virus.

Using an Illumina sequencing machine, Prof Zhang Yongzhen (Kunming/Fudan Uni/CDC/STAsian of the Year) began sequencing

2 a.m., Jan 5: Nature: (T)eam member Chen Yan-Mei alerted Zhang that the virus was related to SARS. Later that day, Zhang notified Shanghai’s municipal health authority of the threat and uploaded the data to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a sequence repository run by the US National Institutes of Health.

(So NIH had it, was sitting on it. Why?)

Jan 5: Using an Illumina sequencing machine, Prof Zhang Yongzhen (Kunming/Fudan Uni/CDC/STAsian of the Year), at a CDC facility in Beijing, completed the sequencing of SARS-Cov-2 and shared it with his long-time collaborator Eddie Holmes (Sydney Uni/NSW Scientist of the Year). Holmes helped him work out what it meant - he was the only non-Chinese scientist granted access at this point.

January 7: Eddie: We submitted a paper on January 7 to Nature, and they were very keen for us to release it.

January 8: Eddie: the Wall Street Journal, of all places, published an article saying it's a novel coronavirus

Then, social media people were discussing that it's a coronavirus and we need to know what it is. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, certainly was very vocal in that. (Jeremy - always the political perspective - sees need to get on top of the narrative)

Jan 9: Eddie: Chinese authorities confirmed that it was a novel coronavirus. At that point, it just seemed to me quite ridiculous because everyone knew this was a coronavirus, but we're not saying what it is. It got to the point where I thought, We have to get this out, because it was just crazy. (This is NIH still sitting on it time)

Jan 10, 8am: Eddie: I called him very early Saturday morning my time, even earlier his time. He was on a plane. He was about to fly between Shanghai and Beijing — I can't remember which direction he was going, but he was strapped in his seat.I said, "Zhang, we have to release the sequence." He said, "Give me a minute to think about it," and he said, "Okay, do it."

Midday (Aus) Jan 10: Luckily, my good friend and colleague Andrew Rambaut, from Edinburgh, was still awake — it was about 1 AM his time. He runs this website called virological.org, which has been a very nice open-access forum. We had some frantic emails, and then we wrote some text for the release, and then I posted the sequence on that website at lunchtime on Saturday here and posted it simultaneously on Twitter. That was the open-access moment.

Zhang was not the only one or even the first one, but it turned out that we first made it open access.

Jan 11: Holmes tweets that the genome is now available at Virological.org (Rambaut’s website).

Jan 11-31: Holmes and Rambaut collaborate with Garry (Tulane), Andersen (Scripps/WuXi PharmaTech) to analyse the virus and draft Prox O whilst communicating with Farrar/Fauci/Collins.

Jan 29: Lipkin flies into Guangzhou China to see for myself what the issues were. Meets with pulmonologist, Zhong Nanshan; Foreign Minister for Health Chen Zhu ( 陈竺); the Minister of Science and Technology;  George Gao (China CDC) and Premier, Li Keqiang.

Jan 31: Andersen emails Fauci to say some of the features (potentially) look engineered. .. Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. (Andersen’s brackets)

Feb 1: Garry says draft of Prox O is complete. (So, overnight, Prox O authors went from looks engineered to completing a full-draft that irrefutably shows it wasn’t?)

Feb 1/(Feb 2 Aus): Pivotal teleconference organized/chaired by Farrar with Fauci, Prox O authors, Koopmans (WHO), Ferguson, Fouchier to form agreement on next steps.

Feb 2 or 3: Teleconference organized by Farrar with Tedros, (includes Fauci and Collins) to lock in a prevaricating Tedros.

It was in these two crisis meetings where the Covid Conspiracy was formulated, potentially. They went into the Feb 1 meeting thinking it was a lab-leak - came out with a co-ordinated plan to cover that up. Then Farrar/Fauci/Collins on-sold it to WHO. Which wasn't hard.

Feb 4: Lipkin, Prox O co-author, returns from China begins media offensive ref, ref, ref, ref, ref: I started going onto the news media and sharing as much as I could.    Says:  (T)here is no evidence that the Wuhan virus will spread to the same extent as SARS,  emphasizes that Covid is less dangerous than the flu, advises against face masks, despite knowing they were effective. (32:35)

TWIV interviewer (talking to Garry): At that time (Feb 1) there was barely any infection outside of China, right? 

Garry: Yeah, that's true.

In fact there was only one case of local transmission in the US by then. 

So the window to take decisive action to stop the spread, stop all that followed, was still wide-open when the teleconference was held.

That’s where the culpability comes in.