A US House of Representatives investigative committee obtained documents showing that Chinese scientists had already isolated and sequenced the genetic material of the Covid virus in late December 2019, two weeks before the communist dictatorship revealed details of the coronavirus to the world.
The documents were obtained by lawmakers from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), but only after threatening to subpoena the agency. The Wall Street Journal had access to the documents and reported the news on Wednesday (17).
The reason the agency has the documents is because GenBank, the database into which a researcher from China uploaded the sequences of genetic material, is owned by the American government. The upload date was December 28, 2019. The researcher is virologist Lili Ren from the Institute of Pathogen Biology at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing.
China, which at the time still insisted that the Wuhan pneumonia had an unknown cause, did not share this material with the World Health Organization (WHO) until January 11, 2020, the day the first cases were recorded in the Chinese city of Shenzhen became. with many foreigners, 876 km from Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic. It took another two months for the WHO to officially declare Covid19 a pandemic.
The coronavirus's genetic material consists of RNA (similar to DNA, but it is a single chain instead of a double chain), the components of which can be represented by a sequence of the letters A, U, C and G. From the sequence of thousands of these letters that make up the viral genome, scientists can predict several characteristics of the cell parasite.
With an exponentially growing problem like a pandemic, two weeks of information delay can make all the difference.
The revelation “shows how careful we need to be about the accuracy of information published by the Chinese government,” virologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Oncology Center in Seattle, US, told the newspaper. He also analyzed the almost complete sequence deposited in the American database. “It is important to remember that we know very little,” he adds.
Lili Ren did not respond to attempts to contact the American newspaper. The institute where she works is staterun. Although she uploaded the virus sequence, she did not publish it and the sequence was deleted on January 16, 2020. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), owner of the database, asked at the time the reason for the deletion, but Ren did not respond. She is the recipient of American funds brokered by the NGO EcoHealth Alliance, which coordinated research projects on how animal coronaviruses can infect humans.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said: “China’s Covid response policy is sciencebased, effective and in line with China’s national realities. It will stand the test of history.”
Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican congresswoman from Washington and chairwoman of the investigative committee, said her country “cannot trust any of the Chinese Communist Party's socalled 'facts' or data” and that it “must seriously question the legitimacy of these actions.” any scientific theories based on this type of information.”