The following additions were made to the Wood House 76 Substack edition of “Did the Corman-Drosten Protocol ‘rely on social media reports’ to seek (& then find) SARS-CoV-2?” (Hockett & Engler) and are republished as a separate entry below. -JAH

Repeat Performance (added 20 Feb 2025)

Christian Drosten was also central to the speedy development of the PCR test for SARS-1. The process also reportedly began “online,” with Drosten and his team reading daily Internet postings about a mysterious respiratory illness in Vietnam.

Corman or Drosten: Who heard first? (added 5 September 2025)

Three news reports state or suggest that Victor Corman heard about SARS being involved in an alleged outbreak in Wuhan before Christian Drosten did (emphases ours):

• Berliner-Zeitung: “What could be read on Twitter shortly before the turn of the year reminded the virus experts at the Charité of an old acquaintance. In Wuhan, a metropolis of eleven million in central China, a novel viral disease had apparently broken out. There was no official confirmation or detailed information about the type of virus. Only rumors on social media. But the team around Christian Drosten, director of the Institute of Virology, sudded that this could be a Sars- like virus. And he and his team are experts for Sars-like viruses.”
• Science: “When another severe respiratory syndrome emerged this year, Drosten —who moved to the prestigious Charité University Hospital in 2017—was prepared. After seeing the first rumors about a coronavirus in China online, Victor Corman, who leads the lab’s virus diagnostics group, began to search existing sequences of SARS-related coronaviruses, isolated from bats, for regions that were the same across different viruses. He was trying to guess what parts of a new SARS-like coronavirus might look like, in order to create a test. Based on those sequences, he designed and ordered 20 pairs of so-called primers, little snippets of DNA, that pair with a pathogen’s genome, so that it can be amplified and detected.”
• Independent: “The German virologist Christian Drosten – who in 2003 developed the first diagnostic test for Sars – heard about the outbreak the next day, from a member of his lab who had caught wind of it on Twitter.”

Earlier Notice? (Added 5 August 2025)

In a video program released on 27 March 2020, Marion Koopmans — professor of virology at Erasmus MC and co-author of the Corman-Drosten protocol — said she first heard about the Wuhan outbreak “through social media and a newspaper,” calling the start “as unusual as everything that followed.”

Koopmans didn’t say when she heard, but in the same program, Erasmus colleague Ron Fouchier (who is not on the Corman et al paper) said he and unspecified others became aware in early December [2019], roughly four weeks sooner than the WHO. Transcript excerpt below:

Narrator: [Ron] Fouchier and [Marion] Koopmans were the first to hear about the outbreak in China. They heard alarm bells while most people thought it was a local problem.

Interviewer: Where were you when you first heard about the crisis in China?

Ron Fouchier: We hear these things early on, so it was the first week of December. We were told about an outbreak of an unknown disease in Wuhan.

Marion Koopmans: The start was as unusual as everything that followed: I heard it through social media and a newspaper.

Ron Fouchier: The first few weeks of rumors were identical to the ones in 2003 with the SARS outbreak.

In another video program airing 22 March 2020, Fouchier said he heard in early December (“just after Sinterklass,” which is 5/6 December). However, in Sept 2021, The Daily Mail reported,

Prof Fouchier told this newspaper he had been muddled over his dates since their discussions were in late December. ‘I am sorry about this confusion,’ he said.

It’s hard to believe that Fouchier was ‘muddled’ in March 2020 about a relatively recent memory — and one closely associated with a holiday.

Ron Fouchier was among the researchers who claimed to have engineered a more pathogenic version of H5N1 and that transmitted between lab-bound ferrets.  The 2003 “rumors” he described as “identical” to those in late 2019 may refer to ProMed posts from February 2003 (below). ProMed is less likely to be called or considered “social media” in 2020.

Update 29 June 2026

I submitted a request to Erasmus MC for emails between Marion Koopmans and Ron Fouchier sent between 1 November 2019 and 31 December 2019. The request was denied.