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I met him, or interacted with him, basically, four times. The first time was the NIH was putting together a meeting on MERS coronavirus to help provide or articulate a strategy for NIH to move forward to help protect the public against a future pandemic. As one of the organizers of that meeting I met him at the meeting, where he gave the introductory talk for five minutes. Then he left the meeting in the first presentation. So 10 minutes, maybe, before the meeting I talked with him. Then, as part of the Red Dawn group, which you must be aware of, there was the Princess, Princess Diamond I think was the name of the cruise ship, where the U.S. government was trying to bring back the passengers from that cruise ship. And on the Red Dawn call Dr. Fauci was there, Redfield was there, and we had a long discussion about how to safely bring them back by air travel. DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com There was a lot of discussion about whether aerosol transmission was possible, and in the 2003 outbreak, toilets can result in aerosolized feces, and in Hong Kong it infected, I don't know, 400 people in a single apartment complex, and the plume spread across to two other apartment complexes. So if you think about the toilets in airplanes, the first thing you think of is you worry about potential aerosol and affecting everybody on the plane. So that was the discussion. That lasted about an hour. I did participate in that call and discussion. So did he. My understanding is they put in barriers to prevent aerosolization from the bathrooms, based on that call. Then the next time was in his office, on the 13th or the 11th, sometimes between the 11th and 13th. So those are the times. So I personally think his comments are pretty accurate. Let's be clear. Coronaviruses were not the lead pathogen that caught the interest of the director of the NIH probably until 2019.
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Okay. But had you emailed with him back and forth? Surely he knew who you were. Was it your understanding that he requested the meeting with you on the 11th or 13th?
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I'm sure that once somebody gave him the paper, he wanted to talk to me. But again, you know, I have trouble remembering names. The number of people he DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com meets has got to exceed what I do by at least 100-fold. So I would be shocked if he felt that he knew me closely, because that's not true. That's just not true.
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Did you have a copy of RaTG, the genome before 2020?
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2026-04-10 09:00
Ralph S. Baric
No. Yeah, so that was first published in 2013 as a sequence fragment, that I didn't notice. And then they came out with a sequence, I think, in, what, 2017, 2018, somewhere around there. It did not catch my notice. I mean, oftentimes, every once in a while we do searches on sequences, to see if there's anything interesting out there that we might want to work on. But it didn't catch our attention. So it didn't come to my attention fully until they published their paper in January of 2020. And so I agree with people like Elaine Chen and others that have looked at the sequence information around that virus and say that I don't know. Like she has reported, we could not recreate the full-length sequence that they provided, based on the sequence information that they provided. There were gaps, in other words. It was not complete. Some of it was very good, where they had good coverage, so they had a lot of coverage of that particular chromosome and then they cloned out a specific plasma DNA of that region and sequenced it. So there are regions that DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com are really good and the spike is really good. Polymerase has gaps in it. We can't close those gaps based on their sequence, using all kinds of different program to try to do it. Now, they may have an in-house program that they used, but personally I think they used a reference sequence and they guessed, to fill the gaps. That's my gut feeling.
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And I had asked you if you had ever not published something. So that's part of what happened in this case. I understand it was partially uploaded and then it was under embargo. So have you ever had a sequence or something under embargo that then you withdrew? I just want to make sure that my initial question of you didn't publish anything is complete, because I understand that you can submit something.
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You can pull it off, yeah. I don't believe we have ever, no. I mean, why would we? We were using public sequences to build viruses. It's not like we were doing this de novo.
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Okay.
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Just to let you know, we have ordered a molecular clone for RaTG13. That genome is heavily debilitated. We eventually isolated it. We have not finished submitting the paper.