Slack / Private Message Drop — page 243

If you had some suspected cases of novel coronavirus, Weijun would be the kind of guy you'd contact - he's been developing diagnostics for SARS too, so would make sense. I think there's probably an earlier timeline here that they may have been obscuring a little - which, honestly, wouldn't surprise me that much. [2020-10-30 16:22:50] [Eddie Holmes] Yes, I looked at the Lancet paper straight away. I've already contacted Weifeng. If that fails I'll contact Weijun Chen. [2020-10-30 16:25:29] [Eddie Holmes] The point is who is the 'you' in your question? Who did they work for? A doctor in Wuhan? What people would do is run the standard panel of tests and if they failed perhaps contact a sequencing company like BGI. But if that were the case why did they not submit samples until 2 weeks later? My guess is that they were created for something else and then backfilled. [2020-10-30 16:25:38] [Kristian Andersen] Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what they say - also, this is from the paper about the metadata [shared file(s): Screen Shot 2020-10-30 at 4.08.13 PM.png] [2020-10-30 16:26:29] [Kristian Andersen] "My guess is that they were created for something else and then backfilled" Yeah, that's my suspicion too - although that _is_ a little unsual. [2020-10-30 16:28:11] [Eddie Holmes] But I think the other option is even more unusual...but I'm as keen to find out as you! At the very least we need a compelling answer for the trolls who are about to descend upon us... [2020-10-30 16:30:09] [Kristian Andersen] Yeah, once the tinfoil hats get hold of this. :boom: [2020-10-30 16:31:55] [Eddie Holmes] But it also doesn't fit the WIV narrative as they don't do anything with the BGI. [2020-10-30 16:33:22] [Eddie Holmes] And the BGI are not even in Wuhan. [2020-10-30 16:33:41] [Kristian Andersen] Yeah, I don't really see how any of this fits with WIV (other than it being close to PLA). It fits better with the Huanan market (since the whole "Line 2" narrative isn't all that stupid) [2020-10-30 16:34:52] [Kristian Andersen] One thing "Steve" considers a potential hypothesis here is a "vaccine challenge trial" - which isn't totally idiotic. But we'd have known about some SARS2 related virus if that were the case. [2020-10-30 16:35:22] [Eddie Holmes] Raccoon dogs in the market would be so simple....yes, the vaccine trial is mad.