The creation of the test for SARS-1 was an astonishingly far-fetched tale...

... and also involved the same main player as the test for "covid".

This article, from March 2003 explains further:

According to this article, in early March 2003:

The story began in early March, when Drosten and his team — research scientist Stefan Günther and a handful of students — were reading daily Internet postings about a mysterious respiratory illness in Vietnam.

“Then, on 15 March, the WHO issued its global SARS alert, and two infected people, a doctor and his wife, landed at Frankfurt airport,” Drosten recalls.

A few weeks later, a "test" was unveiled.

Remarkably, Drosten and his colleagues pulled off this feat just 11 days after the World Health Organization (WHO) issued its alert about the disease. And since the test was unveiled on 26 March it has been distributed to more than 150 labs around the world. All in all, it's a considerable achievement for such a small team, given the high-powered virology labs that were engaged in the same quest.

This is a similar timeframe to that set out in the early 2020 timeline I described here for “covid” (click on the picture to go to the full article):

In the official timeline:

• 30 Dec 2019 - eye doctor recognises a new type of pneumonia

• 5 Jan 2020 WHO announce cases of pneumonia of unknown cause

• 7 Jan 2020 - WHO declares a new SARS-like virus is the cause of the pneumonia cases

• 10 Jan 2020 TiB Molbiol ships first PCR test kits

• 12-13 Jan 2020 WHO accepts the Drosten test as gold standard

One of the authors of the Eurosurveillance paper in which the new PCR test was described was Olfert Landt, who was the founder (and, at the time, the CEO) of TiB-Molbiol.

Some might consider this a conflict of interest, and the journal did receive a number of complaints, although neither Landt nor Drosten agreed:

On 10 June 2020, the editorial team was contacted about a perceived conflict of interest for Olfert Landt, CEO of Tib-Molbiol, who was among co-authors of the article Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR by Corman et al. published in Eurosurveillance on 23 January 2020. No conflict was declared for any of the authors under the Conflict of interest section.

At the time of the publication, SARS-CoV-2 had been identified only 16 days earlier as the causing agent of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and a viral genome sequence had been released on 10 January [1]. Sequences and laboratory protocols developed to detect this novel virus, had been shared by Corman et al. via the World Health Organization (WHO) website already from 13 January onwards and been updated on 17 January [2,3].

The article in Eurosurveillance further detailed the protocols for a screening test and its validation. Making the sequences and protocols publicly freely available (alongside other protocols) in a timely manner, and wide distribution of this information through the WHO website and an open access journal, has allowed researchers and laboratories worldwide to rapidly implement virus testing. Detection is crucial for the public health response to any emerging pathogen posing a health threat. The published article describes a generic protocol and does neither refer to primers or probes from a specific company nor does it evaluate a specific kit. Affiliations for all authors were detailed including that of Tib-Molbiol for Olfert Landt.

In response to the concern flagged, we asked all authors to re-confirm their absence of a conflict of interest. We also received a detailed statement from the corresponding author, Christian Drosten, and from Olfert Landt, who explained that for the main reasons outlined above, they do not consider that being Tib-Molbiol’s CEO constituted a conflict of interest with respect to the article in question at the time of submission. They further confirmed that that reagent sets produced and marketed by Tib-Molbiol are different from those in the protocol published in the article and that they were validated independently from this work.

Considering the above, and following consulation with experts in conflict of interest and research integrity and the journal’s associate editors, the Eurosurveillance editor-in-chief decided to amend the conflict of interest note by adding the following statement:

Olfert Landt is CEO of Tib-Molbiol; Marco Kaiser is senior researcher at GenExpress and serves as scientific advisor for Tib-Molbiol.

The reasoning Drosten and Landt offer for their involvement not being a conflict of interest seem to amount to:

• It was a public health threat.

• The protocol is generic and does not specify primers or probes from a specific company.

But:

• They came up (in double time) with a test from which they ultimately made huge sums of money.

• They are authors of the paper (which famously passed “peer-review” in 24 hours) which constitutes a public validation of that test.

• At the time of publication of that paper, they had already started shipping kits, making money.

If that is NOT a conflict of interest, I am not sure what is.

By the way, something which I have only just spotted is that in this WHO document - dated 17 Jan 2020 and titled “Diagnostic detection of 2019-nCoV by real-time RT-PCR” the “Drosten protocol” specified 45 cycles of amplification!

For more on the evolution of the PCR test, see this thread from Remnant MD from which the above graphic is copied.