This man created our best chance of stopping the next pandemic but now he is under attack. Why?

It was into this crisis that Mr Bogner first stepped in 2006.  

Nancy Cox, then director of the Influenza Division at the USCDC, recalled how she met him at a meeting in Cambridge.

It was on the train back to London he first raised what, in retrospect, was an obvious solution to the data sharing problem: to do what the world of showbiz had done for decades and provide “content providers” with a basic level of protection for their intellectual property.

“He just seemed very chatty and very interested in trying to understand what the problems were,” Ms Cox told The Telegraph. “It was something that he was passionate about.”

What followed was a letter to the journal Nature signed by Mr Bogner, Ms Cox and more than 60 others in which the GISAID concept was formally proposed for the first time. “Scientists participating in the GISAID consortium would agree to share their sequence data, to analyse the findings jointly and to publish the results collaboratively,” read the key line.

The reaction of the (competing) journal Science was instructive, Mr Bogner tells The Telegraph now. Having got wind of Nature’s scoop, it ran a spoiler, including a picture of Mr Bogner with Ms Cox accompanied by the caption “Peter Who?”.

It was the start of a “Who the f**k is he?” theme that Science has been mining ever since, Mr Bogner claims.

It is certainly true Mr Bogner was an outsider. 

Unlike almost all those he now deals with, he was never a straight-As science student, let alone a graduate of an Ivy league university or fellow of an august Royal Society. 

He lives, not in Stanford or Oxford, but just five minutes walk from the beach in Santa Monica, California. 

He prefers skiing and windsurfing to chess and bridge and, while many of the brilliant computational geneticists who use GISAID cluster at one end of the neurodiversity spectrum  Mr Bogner – a multilingual “people person” who once cut a dash as an executive in the entertainment industry – sits firmly at the other. He loves to talk and describes himself as a “behind the scenes guy”. He likes to make a “mysterious exterior of himself”, jokes a colleague. 

Many of those The Telegraph talked to like Mr Bogner and say they have never had reason to question his bona fides. Sir David Nabarro said he had always found him “super constructive and helpful” and “working for the public good”.

“I’ve kind of been a Bogner fan really over the years. But I do appreciate that, in some people’s minds he’s quite a controversial person, mostly because he just gets on and does things and doesn’t like people who say, ‘oh, no, you can’t do that’,” he says.

Dr McCauley, like several others including Dr Cox, described Mr Bogner as “passionate” and praised his ability to bring people together.

“I think his heart is in the right place and that’s the main element, right …I don’t think there’s anything in it for him. I think he just saw a problem and … saw a way of solving it which requires experience and imagination from other fields.”

There are parallels between GISAD and Wikipedia in so far as both rely on a small army of volunteers who carefully check and curate its content. Mr Bogner runs GISAID alone from his home in California but he has a large team of developers and curators around the world who talk of him fondly.

He’s a “classic 1990s alpha guy,” says one. He can be “harsh” but “he’s ultimately always fair to us”.

But make no mistake Mr Bogner has enemies too. 

Jeremy Kamil, of Louisiana State University Health Shreveport, is furious with him, not least because he believes Mr Bogner used the alias “Steven Meyers” to correspond with him on email and telephone in the early part of the pandemic. When he eventually challenged him over it, Mr Bogner denied it.

It wasn’t just “weird,” Dr Kamil told The Telegraph, “he was feeding me. He was being dishonest”.

To Dr Kamil’s surprise, this was the anecdote Science led its piece on, but Mr Bogner would not be the first over-stretched executive to use an alias – indeed “pay-as-you-go” office assistants are common the world over.

Nor is the case clear cut. Two members of the GISAID team say they believe Steven Meyers to be a real person.

One of these, himself a native German speaker, said he had talked to Mr Meyers on the phone when he first started working for GISAID in 2009 and again in 2020.

“He’s a lawyer… for me Steven has always been a guy in the background…. there are two other lawyers here in Germany, for example. They are also in the background,” he said.

Mr Bogner insists Steven Meyers exists, albeit with a different spelling, and describes him as “someone who helped out when we needed help”.

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