US Researchers Deleted Early COVID-19 Samples At Request Of Chinese Scientist - Reports

Researchers from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) deleted gene sequences of early COVID-19 cases from its scientific database upon request from a Chinese scientist who previously submitted the samples, The Wall Street Journal reported

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 24th June, 2021) Researchers from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) deleted gene sequences of early COVID-19 cases from its scientific database upon request from a Chinese scientist who previously submitted the samples, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The incident was first mentioned in a research paper by Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, published online on Tuesday. There, the author raised concerns that the missing deep sequencing data could have given more insight into the early Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 epidemic and the origins of the virus.

The NIH confirmed that they removed the data from their Sequence Read Archive after receiving a request from the Chinese source in June 2020, the newspaper said. The Chinese researcher said that it was to to avoid confusion after the sequences had been updated and were to be posted to another database.

"Submitting investigators hold the rights to their data and can request withdrawal of the data," the NIH was quoted as saying by the WSJ.

Though parts of the deleted sequences are still available in research papers and other online sources, the fact that they were removed from the NIH database, which is one of the main sources for scientific research, casts doubt on China's transparency claims and may hinder further efforts to shed light on the origins of the virus, the WSJ stated.

In March, the World Health Organization released the full version of a report by an international group of experts of the organization on a visit to the Chinese city of Wuhan the world's first hotbed of the coronavirus. They concluded that the leak from the lab was "extremely unlikely," while the virus was most likely transmitted to humans from bats through an intermediary animal.

However, US President Joe Biden has recently ordered the intelligence community to probe the leak theory once more following the report that three researchers from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill with respiratory infections resembling COVID-19 in November of 2019, a month before China officially reported any cases.