Over the past couple of months I’ve spent time reviewing early published papers from Chinese scientists on 2019-nCoV-2019/SARS-CoV-2 and making changes to a timeline I published last summer.

Although some of the methods in the papers are “above my pay grade” — i.e., beyond my current level of speciality/expertise — I am left with some things I still don’t understand but want to understand.

A recent article on Unbekoming —  SARS-CoV-2 Fragments of Fiction: How Mathematical Fraud and Genetic Sequencing Manufactured a Global Crisis by Michael Wallach — brings one of these things to mind. 

He writes:

When we remember that this Fan Wu paper formed, in essence, the bedrock of the “scientific” foundation of the claimed pandemic, it’s hard to say whether one should laugh or cry. It was upon the conclusion of this paper that the PCR testing was designed, and the world was tested for this “novel virus.” It was upon this paper that synthetic “virus” sequences were built by laboratories to test the “virus” for its qualities and to study its “nature.”

I would love to hear from readers who have a) read the study and b) considered events in this and/or other relevant timelines and can explain why it is often said a sequence from the above study was the single reference for anything.

Comments are open; anyone with an informed, relevant response can reply.*

Irrelevant comments will be removed at my discretion. This is a genuine crowdsourcing effort aimed at gathering insights from those who’ve “done the homework” and can help me answer a question — one that may have an obvious answer I’ve simply overlooked.

*Comment invitation was from time of publication