The meeting, which involved 175 Biogen executives, took place at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf Hotel on February 26 and February 27. Many of the executives who unknowingly caught the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, ended up traveling to other states, including North Carolina and Texas.
The report, which was posted to the preprint website medRxiv on Tuesday and has yet to be peer-reviewed, consisted of identifying the genetic profile of the virus that affected people who attended the meeting or their contacts.
The study of nearly 800 COVID-19 genomes, carried by more than 50 researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and other institutions in the state, found that the strain of the virus present at the Biogen conference infected hundreds of people in Boston and was even found in people as far away as Alaska, Senegal, Luxembourg and Slovakia.
Researchers said the conference may have been responsible for around 20,000 cases of COVID-19, reported the Boston Globe. The strain in question represented 1.7% of more than 56,000 global virus samples.
“Any infection that happens early on in an outbreak like this, where it’s exponential, it’s either going to peter out very quickly or wind up infecting a lot of people very quickly,” Stephen Schaffner, a study co-author and computational biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Wall Street Journal.
In a statement Tuesday, Biogen addressed the study’s findings.
"February 2020 was nearly a half year ago, and was a period when general knowledge about the coronavirus was limited," the statement reads, NBC Boston reported. "We were adhering closely to the prevailing official guidelines. We never would have knowingly put anyone at risk. When we learned a number of our colleagues were ill, we did not know the cause was COVID-19, but we immediately notified public health authorities and took steps to limit the spread."
During a news conference Tuesday, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker also commented on the study’s findings and the nature of the respiratory disease.
"It speaks to the power of that virus to move from one person to another to another to another, if people [don’t] wear masks, don’t social distance, don’t take seriously the fact that the fundamental strength of COVID-19 [is] its ability to get from one person to the next," he noted, NBC Boston reported.
