Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded a nearly complete sequence of the Covid virus structure to a U.S. database run by the National Institute of Health on December 28, 2019, two weeks before Beijing shared the viral sequence with the rest of the world, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services documents recently obtained by a House committee reveal.
The HHS documents, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, were obtained by Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee after they threatened to subpoena the agency.
When Beijing shared the SARS-CoV-2 sequence with the World Health Organization on January 11, 2020, two full weeks had elapsed since the virus was sequenced by a researcher at the Institute of Pathogen Biology in Beijing, an arm of the state-affiliated Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences which has ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and People’s Liberation Army.
Those two weeks represent a crucial period in the evolution of the pandemic, as the international health community scrambled to assess and respond to the burgeoning viral threat. In late 2019, scientists across the globe were racing to understand the viral disease that would eventually kill millions.
During that period, Chinese officials still described the disease outbreak in Wuhan, China, as a viral pneumonia “of unknown cause” to the greater public. The latest congressional investigation has again raised questions about what China knew in the crucial early days of the pandemic.
As to the origins of Covid-19, different U.S. government agencies still hold disparate conclusions. While some still hold that the dangerous coronavirus emerged from an infected animal at the Huanan Seafood Market, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Energy concur that Covid most likely emerged from a lab leak in Wuhan.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R, W.A.), Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said that the recent discoveries demonstrate that the U.S. “cannot trust any of the so-called ‘facts’ or data provided by the CCP and calls into serious question the legitimacy of any scientific theories based on such information.” The committee has spent months probing the origins of Covid-19 and U.S. government funding of overseas research.
Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, reviewed the Health Department’s documents and the recently discovered gene sequence. The revelation underscores “how cautious we have to be about the accuracy of the information that the Chinese government has released. It’s important to keep in mind how little we know,” Bloom told the Journal.
The Chinese researcher who uploaded the virus sequence in December, Dr. Lili Ren, did not respond to the Journal‘s email seeking comment. Ren was contracted as a collaborator on a U.S.-funded project to study how coronaviruses can be transferred from animals to humans. The nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance oversaw the project, which included the collection of bat samples in China.
Ren is also under the same National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) grant as the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which has been disqualified from receiving NIH grants for ten years for failing to provide laboratory records requested by NIH and for conducting research that “did lead or could lead to health issues or other unacceptable outcomes.”
China continues to defend its lack of transparency around the virus.
“China has kept refining our COVID response based on science to make it more targeted. China’s COVID response policies are science-based, effective, and consistent with China’s national realities. They can stand the test of history,” a Chinese Embassy spokesperson said.