Chinese scientists knew the genetic makeup of Sars-COV-2, the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic, two weeks before it shared this information with the rest of the world, according to a new report.
This delay, according to a Wednesday press statement from the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, cost the world vital time to prepare, likely worsening the virus’s impact and death toll, which as of December 31, exceeded 7 million.
United States President Joe Biden ordered an investigation into the virus, including a connection with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Biosafety level 4 lab in the Hubei Province city where China’s outbreak appeared to start. Last year, Biden signed into law requiring the U.S. entities to declassify and share intelligence on this potential link.
Wednesday’s revelation suggests the Chinese authorities knew more about the virus than they admitted a full two weeks before they published the sequence and three before they publicly confirmed human-to-human transmission.
Documents published by the Energy and Commerce Committee showed that the viral sequence a Beijing-based scientist had tried to publish in a database was almost identical to the one later shared.
The early sequence was submitted to the National Institutes of Health’s genetic sequence data database GenBank by virologist Lili Ren.
Ren was a researcher at Beijing’s Institute of Pathogen Biology at the Chinese Academy of Medical Science—an institution with ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
However, the NIH on December 31, 2019, informed Ren her submission lacked certain required technical information and would be deleted if this data was not provided.
“Complete feature annotation has not been included for some or all of the sequences you have submitted,” the redacted letter provided to the committee by the NIH said, among other documents.
According to the committee’s press release, the Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed that Ren’s genome was identical to the one shared by the Chinese Center for Disease Control on January 11, 2020.
The Chinese government said it made the virus’s genome public as soon as it was decoded.
Newsweek reached out to the HHS, the NIH, and the White House with written requests for comment.
“This significant discovery further underscores why we cannot trust any of the so-called ‘facts’ or data provided by the CCP and calls into serious question the legitimacy of any scientific theories based on such information,” said the committee press release.
Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images
The committee members said the White House, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the NIH had blocked their inquiry into the origins of the virus.
The Biden administration “obstructed and delayed Congressional investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, refused to produce this sequence for over seven months, and only released it to the [Energy and Commerce] Committee after the committee threatened to subpoena the sequence,” the statement said.
Attached to the committee press release was their letter to Acting NIH Director Lawrence Tabak, dated September 28, 2023.
The letter threatened to issue the subpoena after more than four months with no sign the NIH was cooperating with the committee’s request for documents related to early SARS-CoV-2 sequences, data from early Covid cases, and other related information.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.