Following a delay and my subsequent complaint, the UK’s public-health authority released partially redacted records responsive to my request for emails exchanged between Maria Zambon—head of respiratory viruses and director of reference microbiology at UKHSA—and Marion Koopmans, professor of public-health virology at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam. Both women helped develop the first real-time RT-PCR “test” for 2019-nCoV and were among the 22 authors of the associated Eurosurveillance paper.
UKHSA said it “does not hold one-to-one communication” between the two but could provide correspondence from Koopmans to a wider group that included Zambon, with the third-party information redacted. A few responses from Zambon are also in the file, as is a draft of the Eurosurveillance manuscript with Koopmans’ edits and comments.
Reason for Requesting
I requested the records with several questions in mind:
- Did Koopmans and Zambon correspond about the reported Wuhan outbreak before 1 January 2020?
- Given their comments in the Eurosurveillance paper about the role of social-media reports in shaping the assay design, do their emails shed further light on which and whose reports they relied on?
- Does their correspondence contain any details indicating how they interpreted virus sequences, origin, transmissibility, or other properties attributed to 2019-nCoV?
The emails I received run from 10 to 30 January 2020. That doesn’t mean Koopmans and Zambon didn’t communicate earlier about the reported outbreak—i.e., in December 2019—only that Zambon’s public email address doesn’t appear to have been used if they did.
None of the messages show where or when either of them first heard about “unexplained pneumonia” in Wuhan. Koopmans mentions Virological, a forum where the Wuhan genome was first shared, and Twitter, where she was (and still is) active. Since Twitter (now X) is commonly described as social media, it remains the most likely platform being referenced in the Eurosurveillance paper.
Reading single, stand-alone emails without the full threads is always tricky, but the content does give a sense of the uncertainties both women were dealing with at the time. I point out the parts that, to me, support the idea that 2019-nCoV (SARS-CoV-2) was never clearly established as one distinct, disease-causing entity that spreads person-to-person or through the air. Other analysts should look at these emails, and the full set, through the lens of their specialties and expertise.
Observations
12 January 2020, Koopmans to Zambon, et al | Subject: Re: [ext] Initial genome release of novel coronavirus – novel 2019 coronavirus – Virological
Replying directly to an individual two days after public release of the “novel coronavirus genome” (and the day before the WHO published Diagnostic detection of Wuhan coronavirus 2019 by real-time RT- PCR), Koopmans recognized the limitations and potential flaws of sequencing technologies, saying, “We need to know if there is [sic] possible technical issues (sequences generated on different platforms and analyzed with different software packages), but if confirmed the diversity of viruses found is remarkable.”
The “diversity”, Koopmans went on to say, “could suggest wider circulation or even multiple sources” of the coronavirus.
Koopmans’ reaction to the uploaded sequences strongly suggests she was genuinely surprised—not about virulence, but about prevalence. Her comments imply, essentially, this thing is already out there, and possibly coming from more than one place or host. Whether she ever considered that 2019-nCoV might be endemic and “hitherto unnoticed,” as Martin Neil and Jonathan Engler put it, isn’t clear. The Eurosurveillance paper struck a more cautious note, saying only that there was “growing evidence that the outbreak is more widespread than initially thought.”
Similar to the discussions among the virologists who later classified and named 2019-nCoV, there’s no indication that Koopmans believed she was looking at something with unusual or especially pathogenic characteristics.
13 January 2020, Zambon to Koopmans et al; Koopmans to Zambon et al | Subject: Re: [ext] OFFICIAL: RE: Request for Wuhan collaboration
Zambon and Koopmans both acknowledged the uncertainty and challenges involved with using the sequence information to “test,” and with doing so using existing/available primer sets.
The above emails were sent on the same day the WHO published the group’s diagnostic-detection “blueprint.” By then, public awareness of the alleged outbreak in China was growing and the push for testing had begun, but claims of transmission had not yet been made. Presumably, neither Koopmans nor Zambon were hearing about any rise in morbidity or mortality in their own countries (The Netherlands and England).
20 January 2020 | Koopmans to Zambon and others | Subject: Fw: Manuscript for Eurosurveillance
The day before submission to Eurosurveillance, Marion Koopmans sent her comments on a draft manuscript of “Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR” to someone, with Maria Zambon and selected co-authors copied.
Several sections stand out.
For the Abstract, Koopmans removed and neutralized a claim about growing evidence “for human-to-human transmission and exported cases outside China already being notified.” She commented that “the Chinese stay with the observation that they have found very little in the large group of contacts…we really do not know yet.”
Chinese officials “confirmed” human-to-human transmission that same day, after having said “no clear evidence”, per the WHO, six days earlier.
Koopmans may have been referring to that announcement. It’s also possible she is referring to a Chinese study of a familial cluster that (as far as I’ve been able to deduce) describes the cases that were the basis of the transmission claim. It was submitted to The Lancet on 24 January 2020, after Koopmans’ email. She may have seen or heard about a draft, or she may be referring to some other report entirely.
In any case, the study doesn’t demonstrate transmission, and its authors were more cautious about making that claim than the WHO and Chinese officials were. So Koopmans’ revision, even if still something of an overstatement, was justified.
Several of Koopmans’ additions to the manuscript didn’t make the published paper: a statement about the ethical use of samples and mention of fecal samples from an ongoing study of the bat virome in The Netherlands.
Later in the document, Koopmans commented on the assays having detected bat-associated SARS-related viruses available from other sources by saying, “mmmm…our bat samples all tested negative,” possibly alluding to the ongoing Netherlands study. This comment wasn’t incorporated into the published article.
Her suggestion for Table 2, “add the bat samples, it is valuable given the region,” appears to have been adopted. The number of clinical samples with rhinovirus/enterovirus increased from her draft to the published paper, from 10 samples to 31.
Needed: More Eyes and More Emails
The observations I’ve made about January 2020 emails between Maria Zambon, Marion Koopmans, and others (obtained from UKHSA) are neither exhaustive nor definitive. Readers are invited to review the file and offer their own observations and questions.
Additional emails from the respective chains, and between all architects of the Corman-Drosten protocol, should be secured for better context and to allow for a more complete analysis.
A separate, earlier request to UKHSA for correspondence between Zambon and additional authors, submitted in June 2025, was delayed and ultimately denied after the scope was revised, even though the agency acknowledged it holds information relevant to the request. The stated reason for denial was time and cost.
Both that letter and the file I received in response to my request are appended below.
Records requested from UKHSA by Jessica Hockett on 27 August 2025 and provided on 10 November 2025.
UPDATE (17 November 2025)
Three days after saying, “We need to know if there is [sic] possible technical issues (sequences generated on different platforms and analyzed with different software packages), but if confirmed the diversity of viruses found is remarkable,” Marion Koopmans posted Initial assessment of the ability of published coronavirus primers sets to detect the Wuhan coronavirus to Virological, on behalf of herself and colleagues from Erasmus.
In that post (excerpt below) the characterization of virus diversity across the six sequences as “remarkable” was scaled back to “some diversity,” with “the use of different platforms and software, rather than true differences” described as the “most likely” explanation, rather than “true differences”.
Last edits for clarity made on 18 November 2025 –JAH
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