Wood House 76

Jessica Hockett PhD & Dr Jonathan Engler | Last edits and revisions made on 16 January 2026

Amidst so many problems with the Corman-Drosten protocol — the PCR testing assay used to launch a pandemic — and the circumstances around its emergence, it’s easy to miss a curious and troubling statement in the results section:

Before public release of virus sequences from cases of 2019-nCoV, we relied on social media reports announcing detection of a SARS-like virus. We thus assumed that a SARS-related CoV is involved in the outbreak.

This was a bizarre and striking thing to say, especially given that the virus said to be responsible for “SARS” was found both in people with SARS and many people who had no symptoms at all, and people can have severe acute respiratory syndromes and not test positive for any virus, or for multiple ones (if tested for).

More striking still is that the inference appears to rest not on isolation or clinical evidence, but on reports circulating on social media — an unusual foundation for a diagnostic assay. Why did a group of scientists make an assumption about a virus, or the kind of virus, involved in an alleged outbreak, based on rumors? Which “social media reporting” was it? What, if anything, made it seem reliable? Was this “science” or “social media science”?

Corman et al went on to say that, based on the rumors, they headed straight to GenBank and downloaded SARS-related sequences.

We downloaded all complete and partial (if > 400 nt) SARS-related virus sequences available in GenBank by 1 January 2020. The list (n = 729 entries) was manually checked and artificial sequences (laboratory-derived, synthetic, etc), as well as sequence duplicates were removed, resulting in a final list of 375 sequences.

So not only did 24 scientists from six different countries endorse social media posts as a credible source, they used those as the basis for searching a database, to the exclusion of other possibilities. No citation for these reports is given, nor is there any indication of how these reports were discovered or accessed, by whom, or why they were considered authentic, important, or confirmatory.

Adding insult to injury, the peer reviewers and editors of Eurosurveillance, the scientific journal which published the protocol and describes itself as “among the top journals in its field,” allowed the authors to say they relied on social media reporting without citing or explaining the reports.

This seems an extraordinary laxity considering that both journal editors and any article reviewers would have (or should have) understood the crucial importance of considering the possibility that prior assumptions might influence the direction and outcome of this scientific endeavour.

Corresponding author Christian Drosten did not respond to an inquiry sent several months ago,¹ so we are left to surmise about possible candidates for these “social media” posts.

Potential Candidates

Two news stories imply or state that the reports were tweets. A 20 January 2020Berliner Zeitung article pointed to “what could be read on Twitter shortly before the new year”² as the catalyst for Drosten and his Charité colleagues’ revelation that a SARS-like virus could be the culprit of the alleged outbreak in Wuhan.

Five months later, The Independent pointed to the platform more explicitly, saying, “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.”

One possibility is a 30 December 2019 tweet from an account called “Panda”, started in August 2019, and ostensibly from Hong Kong, that posted images of health alerts from Wuhan with screenshots of chats mentioning SARS.

Another candidate is mentioned in the book Meine Pandemie Professor Drosten Laborbedingungen. Author Walter Van Rossum suggests “social media reports” in the Corman-Drosten paper refers to posts on the ProMed-mail forum, an infectious disease specialist hangout.³ The content (shown below) duplicates news stories published on Sina Finance and makes mention of SARS.⁴

Posts on FluTrackers.com dated 30 and 31 December 2019 shared similar reports. One highlighted a tweet and said (translated), “I don’t know who this is, but this person is tweeting that SARS has been confirmed”.

The account (HongbaoChen) is locked, but the contents which were allegedly reproduced say, “I heard that the 7 critical cases diagnosed were SARS, Wuhan Tongji Hospital, and Huada Gene. Coronavirus has also been confirmed in the Houhu District of Wuhan Second Hospital.”

However, the HongBaoChen account currently visible was created in November 2023. This is not the original account that posted the tweet; the original appears to have been deleted and later replaced by a new account using the same handle.⁵ An image of the original account replying to Peter Daszak’s thread about the rumored outbreak (which could also be considered a “social media report”) is shown below.

Avian Flu Diary reported the local announcements and mentioned the SARS rumors on FluTrackers.⁶ Seeing as a good portion of pneumonia cases are pinned on influenza viruses, and many don’t identify any causal pathogen,⁷ it’s unclear why a site dedicated to Avian Flu presumed that the “outbreak” couldn’t be unidentified (“novel”) influenza virus and seemed to accepted that it was viral.

We hesitate to pore over what the social media reports we’ve shown are saying — or to put any stock in the notion of Drosten and his cohorts actually being directed to a SARS database by tweets, internal message boards, etc — because verifiable evidence of an outbreak in Wuhan involving a new pathogen that subsequently turned into a global pandemic is scant. We do wonder, however, if social media chatter about SARS could have been planted as part of the ‘spreading novel virus’ storyline.

A February 2020 pre-print released by Chinese scientists purported to show spikes in the use of SARS, coronavirus, and shortness of breath on WeChat weeks before ‘cases’ were identified.⁸ The graph showing use of ‘SARS’ and Feidian (the Chinese name for SARS) certainly looks meaningful.

Irrespective of authenticity, and whatever Drosten’s role in the COVID event, perhaps he and/or his colleagues were sent or exposed to conversations on that platform in December 2019 or sooner? Drosten was also central to the speedy development of the PCR test for SARS-1. That “process” also reportedly began “online,” with Drosten and his team reading daily Internet postings about a mysterious respiratory illness in Vietnam.⁹

A Fast Test for the West

Like its SARS-1 predecessor, the Corman-Drosten protocol was developed and released in very short order. Just two weeks elapsed between the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issuing health alerts on December 30, 2019, and the WHO’s initial publication on January 13, 2020.¹⁰

The WHO appeared to acknowledge its proactive role in the test’s development in a 31 December 2024 post on X, stating that it had “brought together partners to publish the blueprint of the first SARS-CoV-2 laboratory test.”¹¹ How these “partners” were assembled and who (or WHO) initiated contact remains unknown.

Five years later, the identity of social media reports attributed in Corman et al’s Eurosurveillance paper is also unknown, as is the reason a group of well-credentialed scientists mentioned such reports in an academic article without being compelled to provide links to the reports or defend their decision to rely on those sources.

We’ve reviewed possible candidates not to place undue attention on “The Mystery of the Missing Social Media” but to further highlight how slipshod the science involved in the development and publications of the test protocol really was.

It would be remiss of us to not proffer the hypothesis that this mention of “social media” was deliberately misdirective. Could the function of this unverified — and unverifiable — claim have been to muddy the waters as regards the precise sequence of events, and create plausible deniability for having been aware of, and partaking in, an artificial and constructed timeline?

Many other questions about the development of the test still remain unanswered or (worse) unasked. What Christian Drosten and his co-developers knew, when they knew it, and how they knew it are among the most important.

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1. Hockett, J. “Inquiry about reference in January 2020 paper.” Email sent to Christian Drosten, 2 September 2024. ↩︎
2. Unsigned. (2020, January 20). “Ein Test aus Berlin identifiziert das neue Sars-Virus [A test from Berlin identifies the new SARS virus].” Berliner Zeitung. https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/gesundheit-oekologie/lungenkrankheit-wuhan-test-aus-berlin-identifiziert-das-neue-sars-virus-li.5268  ↩︎
3. Credit to Robert Kogon for referring us to My Pandemic with Professor Drosten: On the
   Death of Enlightenment under Laboratory Conditions [English translation of title] and Van
   Rossum’s candidate for the “social media posts” referenced in Detection of 2019 novel
   coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR ↩︎
4. “Wuhan unexplained pneumonia has been isolated. The test results will be announced as
   soon as possible” https://finance.sina.cn/2019-12-31/detail-iihnzahk1074832.d.html | “Patients and places of unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan have been quarantined” https://tech.sina.com.cn/roll/2019-12-31/doc-iihnzhfz9428799.shtml ↩︎
5. This observation from Robert Kogon came to us after we originally published this article on 19 February 2025 and we later integrated it into the text as a revision. ↩︎
6. FluTrackers. (2019, December 31). “Hong Kong & Taiwan take notice of unidentified pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan” [Forum post]. https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum/emerging-diseases-other-health-threats/novel-coronavirus-ncov-2019/825565-hong-kong-taiwan-take-notice-of-unidentified-pneumonia-outbreak-in-wuhan ↩︎
7. Zhu, N., Zhang, D., Wang, W., Li, X., Yang, B., Song, J., Zhao, X., Huang, B., Shi, W., Lu, R., Niu, P., Zhan, F., Ma, X., Wang, D., Xu, W., Wu, G., Gao, G. F., & Tan, W. (2020, January 24). “A novel coronavirus from patients with pneumonia in China, 2019.” New England Journal of Medicine, 382, 727–733. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1500245 ↩︎
8. Wang, W., Wang, Y., Zhang, X., Li, Y., Jia, X., & Dang, S. (2020). WeChat, a Chinese social media, may early detect the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in 2019 [Preprint]. medRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.24.20026682 ↩︎
9. Engler, J. (2024, August 26). “The creation of the test for SARS-1 was an astonishingly far-fetched tale…” Sanity Unleashed. https://sanityunleashed.substack.com/p/the-creation-of-the-test-for-sars ↩︎
10. Corman, V. M., Bleicker, T., Brünink, S., Drosten, C., Landt, O., Koopmans, M., & Zambon, M. (2020, January 13). Diagnostic detection of Wuhan coronavirus 2019 by real-time RT-PCR: Protocol and preliminary evaluation (World Health Organization). World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/wuhan-virus-assay-v1991527e5122341d99287a1b17c111902.pdf ↩︎
11. Post excerpt: “By 9-12 January, WHO had published its first set of comprehensive guidance for countries, and on 13 January, we brought together partners to publish the blueprint of the first SARS-CoV-2 laboratory test.” World Health Organization (@WHO). December 31, 2024. https://x.com/WHO/status/1873769167154799068  ↩︎

Next related article:

It’s time for all living authors of the Corman-Drosten Review Report to confront “social media science”

Early emails between virologists who developed the first RT-PCR “test” for 2019-nCoV suggest low certainty about sequencing, novelty, and transmission