Responses to Michael Yeadon, author on the Corman-Drosten Review Report
Below are two responses (a shorter and a longer one) to Mike Yeadon regarding the January 2020 Corman-Drosten PCR paper and the November 2020 critique that he and others wrote. Both address Yeadon’s reply to my Substack Notes questions, which followed comments he made on It’s time for all living authors of the Corman-Drosten Review Report to confront social media science, when it was posted on the Substack version of Wood House 76.
Point-by-Point “Conversational Format” Response
Yeadon : Did [Corman et al] design a test based on a rumour?
Yes. The design of the test was based on the contents of rumors.
Yeadon: I thought they based it on sequences lodged in a database of a “virus” called SARS.
Yes and no. They were directed to (or decided to be directed to) the SARS-CoV section of a database because of what social media reports said about the type of virus involved.
Yeadon: China had allegedly already reported an unusual cluster of pneumonia type illnesses in December 2019, hadn’t they?
The report isn’t alleged, if we assume the 30 December 2019 bulletin from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission is authentic, i.e., it was actually issued by a local authoritative body.
The Corman-Drosten paper doesn’t say when or how the authors themselves learned about the “outbreak.” They deferred to the WHO: “According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the WHO China Country Office was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown aetiology in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, on 31 December 2019” and cite this page.
The outbreak was alleged — and is unsubstantiated to this day.
Yeadon: Now, I know you know that I have for years recognised that everything about this alleged “pandemic” is a lie. This Corman Drosten test obviously included. There isn’t a legitimate way that a diagnostic test could have been developed. No such thing even conceptually makes any sense.
Agreed. It’s illegitimate, self-serving, and circular. People don’t have to take a “viruses don’t exist” position to see and accept that.
Yeadon: So, whether the authors kicked off their efforts because of unverified claims from China or because of unverified claims of illness from elsewhere, it’s still fraud.
It’s all fraud, but location (i.e, China) has nothing to do with the fact that Corman et al say they were directed by social media reports regarding the kind of virus that was rumored to be causing an outbreak involving unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan.
Yeadon: I’ve stated I was wrong to have allowed myself to have been caught up in it.
Yes you have — here and elsewhere.
Yeadon: Am I the only coauthor to have expressed regret over what I now see as pro-perpetrator propaganda?
I haven’t surveyed all of the authors but Lidiya Angelova (U.S.) has made comparable statements on her Substack.
Yeadon: If there are others, I’m happy to see if we can agree to release a statement to this effect. Not that it would gain publicity. Unless the perpetrators wish it, I retain only “freedom of speech but not of reach.”
No joint statement is required or requested. The surviving authors who are in agreement are, of course, free to issue a statement together if they wish. I would also appreciate clarity on why certain authors’ specific contributions are not listed.
Suppression and censorship of views that depart from official and permitted-dissent narratives is very much a problem. Arguably, each of our “reach” is many thousands more than the writers of the U.S. Constitution ever envisioned a single individual could have by simply pressing “post” and we can be grateful for the ability to reach thousands of readers near-instantaneously.
Yeadon: Until then, if I have a single unit of effort to expend, I’m going to focus on counselling people to not sign up for digital ID & not to fear any future threats of “pandemic illnesses and vaccinations”.
People should spend time on what they want to spend time on. Most analysts who take what they do seriously, including yourself, have shown themselves capable of expending more than “a single unit.” Ultimately, bandwidth and personal priorities will determine where someone’s attention goes.
Response to Yeadon in Substack Notes (edited slightly from original)
Yes, the design of the Corman-Drosten test was based on the contents of rumors.
[Yeadon] “China had allegedly already reported an unusual cluster of pneumonia type illnesses in December 2019, hadn’t they?”
The Eurosurveillance paper never says when its authors first heard of an “outbreak” in Wuhan. Wuhan’s health authority issued emergency notices on 30 December 2019— the same day as at least one tweet.
Around then (we aren’t sure when, possibly that day), as Science later reported, Victor Corman began trawling SARS-related sequences, “trying to guess” what a new SARS-like virus might look like in order to design a test.1 The design, in other words, rested on rumor-driven suspicion that a SARS-CoV per se was behind the alleged cluster.
Corman et al admitted as much — basically “we went to the SARS section of the database because that’s what social media chatter suggested”. (I’m pretty sure even a 10-year-old would know that’s a problem!)
What if the online buzz had been about an influenza virus instead? Would Corman and Drosten have been involved? Is a staged pandemic even possible without the perpetrators pointing to a potential viral culprit? Why weren’t more and other culprits sought, especially given that most cases of hospitalized pneumonia aren’t pinned on a single causal agent, or any (tested-for) agent at all?2
Whatever one thinks about viruses or COVID, this much is true: a scientific paper justified a test design on the basis of social media sightings and the journal editors didn’t require the authors to cite or reference their sources. Both of those things are shocking on their face…no PhD required. This is what, for me, makes it so surprising that the subsequent critique, authored by many well-credentialed individuals, failed to mention it.
I could chalk it up to the chaotic nature of 2020 were it not for the fact that at least one critique author (the visual artist, no less!), Bobby Malhotra, called out the reliance on rumor in tweet 65 of his October 2020 thread.
So why wasn’t it included in the final critique?
Was it a deliberate omission to avoid looking stupid, sidestep an indictment of sequencing & testing altogether, or (worse) to protect professional interests? Were all of the critique authors really so invested in the “novel spreading virus” story at that point that they couldn’t see the most obvious questions to ask? (Clearly not, because Malhotra did.)
I’m not requesting mea culpas or group statements. I want to understand why Malhotra’s observation wasn’t included. Raising the point that he did (and/or points like those Jonathan Engler made in 2023)3 could have called the bluff on the whole story in 2020…and still could today.
Can you see how highlighting that the test design – and delimiting of sequences (by Corman and by the Chinese scientists who, in very short order, supplied purportedly “novel” and disease-causing sequences) — was based on rumor helps expose fraud, and does so without compelling or insisting on a “No Viruses” view?
Either way, I hope we can agree that declaring “there are no viruses” or “it’s all fraud” doesn’t answer what actually happened and how. It may satisfy you, and (as you said) you are expending efforts elsewhere, but I’m still of the mind that showing that SARS-CoV-2 (like SARS-CoV-1) wasn’t novel and was never shown to cause illness or transmit human-to-human, and that virologists either knew this or should have known this, could help build a bridge for others to cross.
Countries and affiliations list for each of the 22 authors on the Corman et al Eurosurveillance paper:
Dr. Yeadon did not respond. My “10-year-old” comment was a bit harsh and, interestingly, contested by my 14-year-old daughter when I presented her with the scenario. Her pushback was that the scientists had heard about an observation and hypothesis and were “right” to proceed according to what they had heard, because it was all they had to go on at that point.
- Kupferschmidt, K. (2020, April 28). “How the pandemic made this virologist an unlikely cult figure.” Science. https://www.science.org/content/article/how-pandemic-made-virologist-unlikely-cult-figure ↩︎
- Engler, J. (2024, March 29). “The pathogens causing lung infections cannot be reliably determined by swabbing the nose and/or throat.” Sanity Unleashed. https://sanityunleashed.substack.com/p/the-pathogens-causing-lung-infections ↩︎
- These were effectively side-stepped by one critique author, from my point of view — at
least publicly. https://web.archive.org/web/20250911023531mp_/https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/lab-leak-dialogue-with-clare-craig ↩︎
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