EMAIL · 4 February 2020
FW: Readout from NAS Meeting on Coronavirus
Provenance: Written 3 February 2020, 5:34 pm; forwarded 4 February 3:36 pm to "DIA Friends" from NCPC · 4 pages.
The readout of the NASEM expert meeting whose agenda appears at item 2 — and one of the most substantive documents in this part of the release. The IC attended as listeners only. It records the state of expert opinion within days of the outbreak becoming international news, along with the backstory of how the meeting came to be convened.
Consensus recorded: not a biological weapon. The reasoning given is that if someone were optimising for BW, a great deal is known about SARS that was not implemented here.
Consensus recorded: natural or laboratory accident. Additional sequences with temporal and geographic diversity were sought, particularly from early December, with temporal diversity valued above geographic.
Backstory — the head of one redacted body, with others, called Fauci on the Friday night, concerned by inserts at furin cleavage sites that did not follow expectations, described as "improbable mutations." They likened it to a ten-step process in which sequences exist for steps one to six and step ten, but steps seven to nine are missing.
A Saturday call noted WIV had been working on gain of function of hACE2 receptor binding. On a Sunday call, two experts said the sequences were natural and the rest said they were unsure. It was determined a panel should be convened, probably under WHO so as not to cause problems with China and limit access.
Ralph Baric (UNC) said he was not aware of WIV introducing mutations into the hACE2 receptor, only published chimera work; that insertion of a furin cleaved site is not unprecedented, though not done in this group of coronaviruses; and raised his own 2016 chimera work as a possible political problem for his membership, which the academics and the academy disagreed with.
Another participant’s points: mutations in hACE2 do not look like perfect engineering, which is evidence for natural evolution; BW can be ruled out; a lab accident cannot; and with current data it will never be possible to distinguish natural origin from lab accident. Several hundred sequences held by China were not being made available, and the earliest samples available were from 24 December.
Item 23 of the ODNI COVID-19 document release of 18 June 2026, held complete and readable in the V.A.D.E.S. archive at DEFROST.WORLD.