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I had forgotten. They had asked me to make a statement about that, and I had forgotten about that, but make a statement about that, so I guess two or three years ago. And I haven't heard much about what was going on so I kind of left it behind. But yes, I gave them a written statement. DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com
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I was just wondering if that was the same, you know, the same type of research that you were engaged in on the 4th, or that you were discussing on the 4th. Is that the same?
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Yes, that's the same. That's the same phone call, yes. That's absolutely true.
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Okay. And so on the 4th you had that call, and then I know that you had a call, I think, with Erik Stemmy on the 7th?
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2026-04-10 09:00
Ralph S. Baric
Around the 7th. There were a lot of phone calls in the first three weeks of January. But certainly I did talk to him. The exact date, I'd have to look at my notes. I thought it was more around the 11th or 12th, but it could easily be the 7th.
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Was that the first NIH employee that you had spoken to, or had you spoken with others?
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Somewhere around those dates I also talked to Barney Graham at the VRC, because we'd been working since about 2017 on mRNA-LNP-based vaccines using MERS coronavirus as, in essence, a paradigm model for how to develop an effective vaccine against coronavirus.
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Did you already have a vaccine developed with them, or was it still --
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We had an mRNA vaccine for MERS coronavirus that had been tested in mice, both young and DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com old mice, and it was extremely effective. I think that data was immediately incorporated into the discussions, that I was not part of, but discussions at the Federal level, in terms of prioritizing which vaccines might go forward. So the reason, I think, that we were particularly so excited about that data is that most of the vaccines that I have tested against coronaviruses, epidemic or pandemic, not pandemic, epidemic coronaviruses like the original SARS 2003 strain, or the MERS strain, worked effectively in young animals. But when you took them into aged animals, where the vaccines are less affected by about tenfold, the vaccines would fail. And the beauty about the VRC mRNA vaccine was that the neutralizing titers in the immune responses were as effective in the old animals as the young animals, so they were fully protected. And that was very impressive.