Exposed email shows Peter Daszak, Linfa Wang, and Ralph Baric purposely avoided signing the Lancet statement although Daszak eventually signed likely because of the central role he played in organizing this statement.

Contexts in source publication

Context 1

... is also worth mentioning that Dr. Linfa Wang from Duke-NUS Medical School and Dr. Ralph Baric from the University of North Carolina, both long-term collaborators of Zhengli Shi and the WIV, also consciously distanced themselves from the Lancet statement to make sure that the statement "doesn't link back to our collaboration" because "(o)therwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact" (Figure 2) 16 . In addition to the Lancet statement, on March 17 th , 2020, an opinion article titled "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" was published on the top journal Nature Medicine 17 . ...

Context 2

... variety of homology data that are superfluous, internally inconsistent, or misinterpreted in the text. For example, the authors state that the E protein, which plays a minimal role in pathogenesis, is highly variable; however, the Figure 2 shows a fairly stable amino acid sequence. In lines 4-5, the authors state that SARSCoV-2's E gene is highly permissible to mutations because in a 2-month period there have been 4 nonsynonymous mutations. ...

Context 3

... is acknowledged in the field that there are gaps in the phylogenetic trees of the coronavirus family, making it difficult to determine accurately the likelihood of similarity between 2 viral variants. Additionally, Figure 2 shows only 1 sequence from an early time point in the pandemic and 4 samples from April. If other samples from February were to be included, then there might not be 100% amino acid sequence identity between SARSCoV-2 samples and ZC45 and ZXC21. ...

Context 4

... what Warmbrod et al. have criticized, we indeed described how our alignments were done. In the legend of Figure 2, we specified that "alignments were done using the MultAlin webserver (http://multalin.toulouse.inra.fr/multalin/)". We did not list this information again in Figure 4. ...

Context 5

... is also worth mentioning that Dr. Linfa Wang from Duke-NUS Medical School and Dr. Ralph Baric from the University of North Carolina, both long-term collaborators of Zhengli Shi and the WIV, also consciously distanced themselves from the Lancet statement to make sure that the statement "doesn't link back to our collaboration" because "(o)therwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact" (Figure 2) 16 . In addition to the Lancet statement, on March 17 th , 2020, an opinion article titled "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" was published on the top journal Nature Medicine 17 . ...

Context 6

... Mischaracterization of sequence homology data. Lines 9-10, referring to Figure 2: The authors present a variety of homology data that are superfluous, internally inconsistent, or misinterpreted in the text. For example, the authors state that the E protein, which plays a minimal role in pathogenesis, is highly variable; however, the Figure 2 shows a fairly stable amino acid sequence. ...

Context 7

... 9-10, referring to Figure 2: The authors present a variety of homology data that are superfluous, internally inconsistent, or misinterpreted in the text. For example, the authors state that the E protein, which plays a minimal role in pathogenesis, is highly variable; however, the Figure 2 shows a fairly stable amino acid sequence. In lines 4-5, the authors state that SARSCoV-2's E gene is highly permissible to mutations because in a 2-month period there have been 4 nonsynonymous mutations. ...

Context 8

... is acknowledged in the field that there are gaps in the phylogenetic trees of the coronavirus family, making it difficult to determine accurately the likelihood of similarity between 2 viral variants. Additionally, Figure 2 shows only 1 sequence from an early time point in the pandemic and 4 samples from April. If other samples from February were to be included, then there might not be 100% amino acid sequence identity between SARSCoV-2 samples and ZC45 and ZXC21. ...

Context 9

... what Warmbrod et al. have criticized, we indeed described how our alignments were done. In the legend of Figure 2, we specified that "alignments were done using the MultAlin webserver (http://multalin.toulouse.inra.fr/multalin/)". We did not list this information again in Figure 4. ...