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Well, thank you for being here, and we thank you for being here voluntarily. We appreciate it. I've been working with your counsel and thank you. We're going to conduct this in two parts. We have a lot of questions for you, but I intend for this to be conversational. We're happy you're here. We've obviously been looking at this for a long time. It is 2026. But we haven't had a chance to engage directly, but your team has provided us documents, and we appreciate that. So, you know, I wanted to kind of be up front with you, where I'm coming from, where the Chairman is coming from. I think a lot of people are like, "It's 2026. Why are we still talking about COVID, COVID origins?" The reason that we asked you here today is because we feel like we don't have all the answers, not specifically from you but generally from our government. The other day DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com I accidentally went on Twitter, and there was a debate on Twitter again over whether it was a lab leak or not, renewed debate. So this is something that, you know, it's not settled. I don't know if it will ever be settled. But from our perspective there are still a lot of outstanding questions about taxpayer-funded research. We shut down our economy. We withheld children from going to school. And those may have been necessary responses, may not have been. But in order for us to make changes or assess the situation we have to understand what happened. And that's why we're here, six years later. So I just wanted to lay that out. We're not accusing anyone of anything. We're genuinely just trying to get to the truth, or at least try to understand it to the best that we can.
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It's a pleasure to be here.
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Thank you. I wanted to start, obviously, you gave testimony in the House.
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I did.
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2026-04-10 09:00
Christina Salazar
And I wanted to just start -- I know this may be a loaded question, but is there anything from that testimony that you would like to, off the bat, clarify or generally -- and we may talk about that today, but I just wanted to see if there was any portions of that testimony that you wanted to clarify or provide any DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com statements on.
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Nothing comes to mind, but if you have questions on that testimony I'll be glad to give you my current thinking.
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Okay. Great. Well, let's start early outbreak. So when was the first you heard of the outbreak?
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A notice went up on ProMed about a new respiratory infection in Wuhan on December 31st, and I immediately got phone calls from several collaborators who were letting me know about it. I didn't find out it was a coronavirus until about the 4th of January, when a colleague of mine at the University of Virginia asked me to participate in a phone call with some Chinese researchers to try to get them in contact with Gilead to set up trials with remdisivir.
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And you said that was University of Virginia?