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U.S. congressional investigators say Chinese researchers isolated and mapped the virus that causes COVID-19 in late December 2019, at least two years before the Chinese government disclosed details of the virus that has claimed so many lives worldwide, according to information about which China decreed in the critical early days of the coronavirus outbreak.
Documents obtained by a House committee from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services show that a Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded a near-complete genetic sequence of the virus on December 28, 2019. The documents were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. At the time, Chinese officials were still publicly describing the illness that broke out in Wuhan, China, as a viral pneumonia of “unknown cause” and had not yet closed the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. The market was one of the first places where the coronavirus broke out.
According to the U.S. government’s epidemic timeline, China did not share the virus’s genetic sequence with the World Health Organization until January 11, 2020.
The new information does not shed light on the debate over whether the coronavirus came from infected animals or a laboratory leak, but shows that the world still lacks a comprehensive understanding of its origins.
Some experts said the two-week delay could be crucial in helping the international medical community determine how the new coronavirus is spreading, formulate medical defenses and eventually begin developing a vaccine. At the end of 2019, scientists and governments around the world scrambled to understand the mysterious disease that was eventually named Covid-19. The disease would go on to kill millions of people and infect far more.
This “suggests that we need to be cautious about the accuracy of the information released by the Chinese government,” said Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. “It’s important to remember that we know very little about it.” Bloom reviewed these documents and recently discovered genetic sequences.
The Chinese researcher who submitted the virus sequence, Dr. Ren Lili, of the Institute of Pathogen Biology in Beijing, did not respond to an email seeking comment. The institute is affiliated with the state-funded Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.
A Chinese Embassy spokesman said China has continuously improved its COVID-19 prevention and control measures based on science to make them more targeted. China’s COVID-19 policy is scientifically sound, effective, in line with China’s national conditions and can stand the test of history.
Documents detailing the new schedule were obtained by Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee after they threatened to subpoena the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Melanie Egorin, assistant secretary for legislation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, wrote last month to the committee chairwoman, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., saying that Ren Lili had made a request to a genetic database managed by the National Institutes of Health on December 28, 2019. GenBank submitted the virus sequence.
The first known sequence of the new coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2, was released on January 11, 2020, after Chinese health authorities shared information with the World Health Organization. Additionally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said the virus sequence was shared with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in China on Jan. 5 but was not shared with scientists worldwide.
Egorin wrote that the virus sequence provided by Ren Lili in December 2019 was never published and was removed from the database on January 16, 2020 after the NIH asked her to provide further technical details according to its protocol, but she did not provide a response. It is unclear why Ren did not respond to Lili.
On January 12, the National Institutes of Health received and published SARS-CoV-2 virus sequences from another source.
“The sequence published on January 12, 2020 is almost identical to the sequence submitted by Ren Lili,” Egorin told the committee.
McMorris Rodgers said in a statement that a researcher at a Chinese lab with an official background isolated and mapped the virus long before the Chinese government publicly announced it, a discovery that showed the U.S. that “any so-called ‘facts’ or Data from…” The Chinese Communist Party cannot be trusted and raises serious questions about the legitimacy of a scientific theory based on such information. The committee has spent months investigating the origins of the coronavirus, the U.S. government’s conduct in funding foreign research projects and other matters.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health did not respond to reporters’ questions about why the information that Ren Lili had submitted the sequence was not released earlier.
Although the exact sequence of the new coronavirus was not previously known to exist in the US database, Ren Lili has written in the past about her search for the cause of the new coronavirus. In an article published in May 2020 in the Chinese Medical Journal (English version), she and her colleagues described five patients admitted to a hospital in Wuhan, China, between December 18 and 29, 2019. One patient. The sequencing identified a new coronavirus that is “associated with severe and fatal respiratory disease in humans,” they wrote.
Ren Lili is listed in the contract documents as a collaborator on a U.S.-funded project studying how coronaviruses are transmitted from animals to humans. The work, overseen by the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, includes collecting bat samples in China.
The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Chinese experts met with the World Health Organization in Beijing on January 3, 2020, but those experts did not disclose that the new disease was caused by a coronavirus, although Chinese officials are already aware of this fact.
Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, said: “The virus sequences submitted (to the database) show that scientists in China actually knew, at least before December 28, 2019, that this pneumonia was caused by a new type of.” Lung infection. Caused by the coronavirus.”
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