The National Institutes of Health (NIH) deleted COVID-19 gene sequences that may have proven valuable to detecting earlier the probability the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated at the Wuhan lab.
The deleted gene sequences were recently discovered in a Google cloud database by a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The finding was revealed in an academic paper awaiting peer-review, authored by Dr. Jesse D. Bloom.
“The origin and early spread of SARS-CoV-2 remains shrouded in mystery,” Bloom writes. “Here I identify a data set containing SARS-CoV-2 sequences from early in the Wuhan epidemic that has been deleted from the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive. I recover the deleted files from the Google Cloud, and reconstruct partial sequences of 13 early epidemic viruses.”
“Phylogenetic analysis of these sequences in the context of carefully annotated existing data suggests that the Huanan Seafood Market sequences that are the focus of the joint WHO-China report are not fully representative of the viruses in Wuhan early in the epidemic,” Bloom significantly notes. “Instead, the progenitor of known SARS-CoV-2 sequences likely contained three mutations relative to the market viruses that made it more similar to SARS-CoV-2’s bat coronavirus relatives.”
The NIH, which encompasses 27 federal agencies, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, has attempted to explain the deletion.
“Submitting investigators hold the rights to their data and can request withdrawal of the data,” the NIH said in a statement. The issue is whether it is ethical to cover up perhaps one of the greatest crimes, if not one of the most egregious lies, committed by any government in the 21st century.
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