Chinese researchers isolated and mapped the virus responsible for COVID-19 in late December 2019, at least two weeks before Beijing provided facts about the deadly virus to the world, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported, citing congressional investigators.
Dr Lili Ren, a Chinese scientist at the Beijing-based Institute of Pathogen Biology, uploaded the covid sequence in 2019.
Overview
Documents received by a House committee from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and examined by WSJ indicate that, on 28 December 2019, a Chinese researcher in Beijing submitted a virtually complete sequence of the virus’ structure to a US government-run database.
Melanie Egorin, HHS assistant secretary for legislation, informed the committee’s chair, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, last month that Ren submitted the virus sequence to GenBank, a genetic database managed by the US National Institutes of Health.
The US government’s pandemic chronology reveals that China disclosed the virus’ sequence to the World Health Organisation (WHO) on 11 January 2020. Furthermore, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta reports that the virus sequence was shared within China on 5 January but was not made public to experts all over the world.
US House Committee says China delayed releasing COVID-19 information for weeks and lied about sharing it immediately https://t.co/0KS8FxeGCC
— Insider International (@InsiderIntl) January 19, 2024
According to WSJ, the sequence Ren submitted was never published and was deleted from the database on 16 January 2020. On 12 January, the NIH received and published a new covid sequence obtained from another source.
In a May 2020 article published in the Chinese Medical Journal, Ren and her colleagues detailed how samples were collected from five patients at a hospital in Wuhan, China, between 18-29 December 2019. They noted that the sequencing confirmed the presence of a novel coronavirus “that is associated with severe and fatal respiratory disease in humans,” WSJ reported.
Defending the government move, a Chinese embassy spokesperson stated, “China has kept refining our COVID response based on science to make it more targeted.” “China’s COVID response policies are science-based, effective, and consistent with China’s national realities. They can stand the test of history,” the official added.
Expert Remarks
Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Centre in Seattle, who analysed the documents and the recently discovered gene sequence, said it “underscores how cautious we have to be about the accuracy of the information that the Chinese government has released.” Bloom, in a post on GitHub, further said that the “immediate public release of the sequence could have accelerated by several weeks the development of COVID-19 vaccines that saved thousands of lives per week in the US alone.”
“This [database] submission shows that in fact, at least by 28 December, 2019, scientists within China did know this pneumonia was being caused” by a new coronavirus, Bloom added.
Meanwhile, Richard Ebright, a scientist at Rutgers University, stated that having the virus information two weeks earlier “would have helped in the early stages of the outbreak,” particularly in establishing a more effective testing routine.