(Jackie Flynn-Mogesen/ Mother Jones) — In early January 2020, weeks before the World Health Organization officially uttered the word “pandemic,” the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, a hospital associated with Fudan University, received a sample of a mysterious virus that had sparked a cluster of pneumonia cases more than 400 miles away, in Wuhan. Professor Zhang Yongzhen, a virologist who had sequenced genomes from thousands of new mRNA viruses over the course of his career, quickly got work on this one.
Zhang completed the sequence in under two days, as he recalled in an interview with Time last summer, and submitted his results to a database run by the United States National Institutes of Health for review. But fearing it would take too long for the data to reach people who needed it, Zhang and his team decided to go straight to the public: On January 11, they posted the sequence on the open-access site virological.org. (…)