A Chinese researcher isolated and mapped the Covid virus – and submitted the information to a US database – two weeks before Beijing officially told the world, it has been claimed.
The explosive allegation raises fresh questions over who knew what during the early days of the pandemic and whether lives were needlessly lost as governments dragged their heels.
Documents obtained from the US Department of Health and Human Services by House Republicans and reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, allege that virologist Dr. Lili Ren uploaded nearly the entire sequence of COVID-19’s structure to a US government-run database on Dec. 28, 2019.
At this point in time, Chinese officials were still publicly describing the disease outbreak in Wuhan as a viral pneumonia “of unknown cause” and had yet to close the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, site of one of the initial COVID-19 outbreaks.
Two weeks later, when the virus had already gone global, Beijing would share information with the World Health Organization that was virtually identical to that of Dr Ren’s.
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A “nearly identical” genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was submitted to GenBank by a separate team of Chinese researchers and was published on January 12, 2020, revealed a letter sent by Melanie Anne Egorin, a senior official at the HHS, sent to House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders and that was made public on Wednesday.
According to public health experts who reviewed the documents, the two weeks that elapsed between sequencing Covid and going public with the findings squandered an opportunity to learn more about the virus and mount an informed response in a timely fashion.
The failure to publish the genetic sequence submitted by Ren is “retroactively painful,” Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, was quoted as saying.
Bloom noted that the genetic sequences may have expedited new tests and vaccines to combat the coronavirus.
“That two weeks would have made a tangible difference in quite a few people’s lives,” Bloom said.
The origins of COVID-19 remain a mystery more than three years after the pandemic.
Did the virus originate in animals or leak from a Chinese lab? The answer to that question has profound implications for how the world responds to the next inevitable pandemic.