The genetic sequence of SARSCoV2, or simply coronavirus, which causes the disease Covid19 that struck the world in a pandemic between 2020 and 2022, has been sent to a database at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) transmitted. two weeks before its release by the Chinese government.
The information was released from documents shared with US lawmakers last Wednesday, the 17th.
Despite the virus' appearance on American soil, the genetic sequence does not point to the origin of the coronavirus but contradicts the Chinese government's claims about its knowledge of the information, an expert told CNN International.
The failure to detect the emergence of the virus at this time may have cost crucial weeks to develop a vaccine against the disease.
According to CNN, virologist Dr. Lili Ren of the Institute of Pathogen Biology of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College submitted the genetic sequence to GenBank on December 28, 2019, according to a letter sent in December by Dr. Melanie Egorin to US House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers.
GenBank is a “genetic sequence repository that collects, preserves, and makes publicly available compiled and annotated nucleotide sequence data from all areas of life.” It is managed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, part of the NIH.
However, the virologist's submission “was incomplete and did not contain the information necessary for publication,” according to the letter to American lawmakers. As a result, Ren received a request for resubmission three days later, but “NIH never received the additional information requested.”
After that, according to the document, the submission was removed from the processing queue on January 16, 2020 and “the sequence was never made publicly available on GenBank.”
Another sequence, different from the one originally sent but “almost identical” to Ren's, was published in GenBank on January 12, Egorin said, a day after the World Health Organization (WHO) said it had the sequence received from China.
On March 11, 2020, COVID19 was classified as a pandemic by the WHO. The term “pandemic” refers to the geographical distribution of a disease rather than its severity.