Slack / Private Message Drop — page 422

Holmes posted to your discussion forum on January 11th. I have the utmost respect for your scientific knowledge. The accuracy of reporting on GISAID during 2020 left much to be desired, to put it mildly. Some of what was published, even by reputable outlets, was a disservice to science. Just look at what the South China Morning Post (SCMP) wrote on January 11th, 2020: "The relevant institutions have also uploaded the genetic sequence onto one online GenBank (GISAID). GISAID is cross-checking the information and will publish it upon completion." When their article was published, the first genomes were already available on GISAID - which the SCMP should have known, because the article used the first image of the coronavirus from the GISAID homepage, the caption of which stated "China releases genetic sequence of the newly discovered coronavirus from Wuhan." It is disheartening that, nearly a year later, inaccurate -- and conflicting -- statements regarding when and where the first genomes were made available are still being disseminated. Two well-known outfits recently published conflicting accounts. Science News stated: "10 January Genetic sequence posted to virological.org", while Nature News states that the first sequence was posted on the website virological.org on 11 January 2020. Neither news organization had done even the most basic research, and did not realize that there were discrepancies in reports of when and where the first coronavirus sequences were released to the world. I am sure we both agree this is not a competition. GISAID was not established for fame or compliments. What matters, is that we aid public health by incentivizing and encouraging data sharing in crises like the one we are currently experiencing, so that those developing medical interventions -- whether vaccine or diagnostics to mention a few -- can proceed with confidence in the quality of the data they rely on.``` [2021-01-19 00:43:08] [Andrew Rambaut] This suggests the genomes were already publicly available for 24 hours when you posted to virological, Eddie. [2021-01-19 01:14:07] [Eddie Holmes] Can he prove this: "George's alert gave us a chance to prepare, and gave our technical team time to set up an HTML area. We received the first 3x genomes and metadata in the afternoon of January 9th at 3:29 pm PST (2020-01-09 23:29 UTC). Two of these genomes, HB-01 and HB-05, were released on GISAID after processing, a little more than an hour later, at 4:41 pm PST and 4:44 pm PST (2020-01-10 0:41 UTC and 2020-01-10 0:44 UTC), respectively." [2021-01-19 01:19:22] [Eddie Holmes] This is wrong: "Science News stated: "10 January Genetic sequence posted to virological.org", while Nature News states that the first sequence was posted on the website virological.org on 11 January 2020. Neither news organization had done even the most basic research, and did not realize that there were discrepancies in reports of when and where the first coronavirus sequences were released to the world." That's just the time zone difference between Australia and elsewhere. [2021-01-19 01:24:12] [Eddie Holmes] This note from HK also says the 12th as does the stuff from the WHO. [shared file(s): Screen Shot 2021-01-19 at 8.22.42 pm.png] [2021-01-19 01:25:04] [Eddie Holmes] [thread - ID: 2021-01-19 01:25:04] Why did not a single person in the world see the sequences on the 10th? Something does not make sense here at all. [2021-01-19 01:25:35] [Andrew Rambaut] The post was on the 11th at about 1am GMT - the posting has at the top the 10th because that is when we started to write it (of course it was already the 11th in Australia and China then). So that is probably the confusion about your post.