According to @WSJ, Chinese researchers directed the U.S. National Institutes of Health to delete gene sequences of early #COVID19 cases from a key scientific database, raising concerns that scientists may lack access to key information to study its origin. wsj.com/articles/covid…
The NIH confirmed that it deleted the sequences after receiving a request from a Chinese researcher who had submitted them three months earlier.
“Submitting investigators hold the rights to their data and can request withdrawal of the data,” the NIH said in a statement.
“Submitting investigators hold the rights to their data and can request withdrawal of the data,” the NIH said in a statement.
The removal of the sequencing data is described in a new paper posted online Tuesday by Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
The paper, which hasn’t been peer reviewed, says the missing data include sequences from virus samples collected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January and February of 2020 from patients hospitalized with or suspected of having Covid-19.
Some of the deleted information is still available in a paper that was published in a specialized journal, but scientists typically look for gene sequences in major databases like the one the NIH maintains, Dr. Bloom said.
He said he was able to find the deleted data after searching for it elsewhere online. The missing sequences are unlikely to change researchers’ current understanding of the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan.
But Dr. Bloom said their removal sows doubts about China’s transparency in the continuing investigation into the origin of the pandemic. Some other scientists agreed.
“It makes us wonder if there are other sequences like these that have been purged,” said Vaughn S. Cooper, a University of Pittsburgh evolutionary biologist who wasn’t involved in the new paper and said he hasn’t studied the deleted sequences himself.
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