Saturday, February 1, 2020

Conference call at 2:00 PM with Jeremy, Francis and several other scientists gathered by Jeremy (see below). Participants in the Feb., 2020 call included: • Francis Collins, Director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, U.S.; • Anthony Fauci, Director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, U.S.; • Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust; • Patrick Vallance, U.K. Chief Scientific Adviser and Head of the Government Science and Engineering; • Kristian Anderson, Director of Infectious Disease Genomics, Scripps Research Translational Institute, CA, U.S.; • Christian Drosten, Director of Human Virology at the German Center for Infection Research at Charité – Universitätsmedizin, Germany; • Edward Holmes, Professor of Viral Evolution at University of Sydney; • Andrew Rambaut, Professor of Molecular Evolution, University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology, U.K.; • Ron Fouchier, Deputy Head of Department of Viroscience, Erasmus Medical Center, NL; • Robert Garry, Professor of Virology, Tulane University School of Medicine, Louisana, U.S. ; • Mike Ferguson, Professor of Life Sciences at University of Dundee, U.K.; and • M.P.G. Koopmans, Head of Department of ViroScience, Erasmus Medical Center, NL. There was not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion. Ron Fouchier said he was sure that this could occur naturally and we should not waste our time and divert effort to pursue this. This is expected of him since he was the original GOF person with Yoshi Kawaoka. Also, Christian Drosten was with Ron; the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible and given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go. We decided to have Jeremy with Francis to contact Tedros with Stewart Simonson’s help (I arranged this) to see if Tedros would convene experts. Meanwhile, the DHS and DOT and FAA are working hard on the logistics of diverting plans to selected airports that are associated with the capability of screening with questions and quarantining or moving to voluntary isolation. Airports are: LAX, SFO, Seattle, ATL, ORD, Hawaii, Newark, IAD, Detroit, DFW JFK, and Seattle PRESS: CNN (truck came to my house since I was so busy with wall-to-wall conference calls and hundreds of e-mails.;