The National Institutes of Health defended its decision to delete its record of the genetic sequencing of COVID-19 cases from early in the coronavirus pandemic, apparently done at the request of Chinese researchers.
The revelation was revealed by a U.S. virologist who discovered the information was scrubbed from the NIH database.
This comes as the United States and its allies seek to determine if the virus sprang from a mysterious lab in Wuhan, China, which stymied an earlier investigation by the World Health Organization dismissing the lab theory.
“Here I identify a data set containing SARS-CoV-2 sequences from early in the Wuhan epidemic that has been deleted from the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive,” noted Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in a scientific paper released Tuesday. “I recover the deleted files from the Google Cloud, and reconstruct partial sequences of 13 early epidemic viruses.”
Bloom added his analysis cast doubt on the alternative theory the virus originated in a so-called “wet market” where exotic foods and live animals are sold.
Read more at Washington Examiner.
{Matzav.com}
Chinese virus, after all said and done.
If this investigation favors Donald Trump and his Republican allies, if it confirms anything Trump has said in the past, it must be squashed immediately. There is no room in this country for Conservative truths. And I said the same thing about any possible investigation into Biden’s Ukrainian corruption scandal; thankfully, Congress and the media were wise to discard any possible investigation into Biden. Let’s keep the train rolling on the right tracks; let’s make sure the NY Attorney General continues the witch hunt against Trump, and let’s refocus our obsessions on the Capitol Hill protests. Let’s continue these congressional hearings against Trump, and if these hearings interfere with Biden’s ability to pass legislation, like they interfered with Trump’s legislative agenda when the latter was President, who cares.