Reports of deletion of some early sequences of coronavirus from Wuhan have surfaced, casting shadows over China’s transparency on Covid-19 origin once again, news agency ANI reported. Data on the earliest cases of the coronavirus disease is integral to scientists getting closer to the spark that caused the pandemic.
Jesse Bloom, a virologist and professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, discovered that early sequencing data of the virus were missing from the Sequence Read Archive, a public archive of high throughput sequencing data. It was possible that the Chinese researchers had deleted them “to obscure their existence,” he said.
According to an opinion piece in The Washington Post, called ‘Doubts about China’s transparency on the pandemic origins are piling up’, Dr Bloom’s discovery adds to the pile of questions about whether China is hiding something. “It is time to launch a serious, sustained investigation,” it says.
Evidence from the earliest patients “could suggest whether the virus jumped from an animal host to a human, in a zoonotic spillover, or whether the infection came from an inadvertent accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was actively studying bat coronaviruses and their potential to infect people. So far, the earliest cases have not been found,” it adds.
The article further says that the Chinese researchers didn’t completely hide the data, but removed it from where people were most likely to look for it. “…they included some in an article published last year in an obscure journal, but the deletion meant that anyone looking for these early Wuhan cases would not find them in the most likely place, the Sequence Read Archive,” it says.
When Jesse Bloom asked the researchers why they did it, they did not answer, according to ANI. To this, The Washington Post article says, “China took offline a major database at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and imposed gag orders on medical workers and others. It has steadfastly denied that any kind of laboratory accident contributed to the pandemic and repeatedly suggested that the origins are outside its borders.”
