Did the Corman-Drosten Protocol “rely on social media reports” to seek (& then find) SARS-CoV-2?

Amidst so many problematic things about 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 statement, especially given that 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).

So why was this assumption made? A group of scientists was saying they made an assumption about a virus involved in an alleged outbreak based on social media reports about its detection. Which "social media reporting" was it? Why did the test developers rely on it? Is this "science" - or "social media science"?

Corman et al go on to say that, based on this assumption, they went 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 apparently 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, so we are left to surmise about possible candidates for these “social media” posts.¹

Potential Candidates

One candidate comes from a  story about the new test published in Berliner Zeitung on 20 January 2020 which pointed to “what could be read on Twitter shortly before the new year” as the catalyst for Drosten and his Charite colleagues’ revelation that a SARS-like virus could be the culprit of the alleged outbreak in Wuhan.

We identified a 30 December 2019 tweet that might be along the lines of what Berliner Zeitung meant. An account called “Panda”, started in August 2019 and ostensibly from Hong Kong, 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.² The content duplicates news stories published on Sina Finance and makes mention of SARS.³

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 appears to have been created in November 2023, which raises questions about the authenticity of the tweet and of the FluTracker posts.

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 paper 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. 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?

A Fast Test for the West

Whatever the catalysts, the Corman-Drosten protocol was developed and released at remarkable speed. 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. Recently, the WHO appeared to acknowledge its proactive role in the test’s development, stating that it had “brought together partners to publish the blueprint of the first SARS-CoV-2 laboratory test.” 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.

Comment setting changed post-publication because article is co-authored.

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Update: For readers who may not be aware, 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.

The creation of the test for SARS-1 was an astonishingly far-fetched tale...

1. Hockett, Jessica. “Inquiry about reference in January 2020 paper.” Email sent to Christian Drosten, 2 September 2024.

2. 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

3. Wuhan unexplained pneumonia has been isolated. The test results will be announced as soon as possible and Patients and places of unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan have been quarantined