An investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives 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 from the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) by parliamentarians, but only after a threat to subpoena the agency. O Wall Street Journal had access to the documents and broke the news this Wednesday (17).
The reason the agency has possession of the documents is that GenBank, the database to which a researcher from China uploaded the sequences of genetic material, is owned by the American government. The date of Upload it was December 28, 2019. The researcher is virologist Lili Ren, from the Institute of Pathogen Biology of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, in Beijing.
China, which on that date still insisted that Wuhan pneumonia had an unknown cause, only shared this material with the World Health Organization (WHO) on January 11, 2020, the date on which the first cases were recorded in Shenzhen, a Chinese city. with many foreigners 876 km from Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic. It took the WHO another two months to officially declare Covid-19 a pandemic.
The genetic material of the coronavirus is made of RNA (similar to DNA, but it is a single chain instead of a double one), whose components can be represented with 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 of the characteristics of the cellular parasite.
For an exponentially growing problem like a pandemic, two weeks of information delay can make all the difference.
The revelation “highlights how cautious we need to be about the accuracy of information released by the Chinese government”, virologist Jesse Bloom, from the Fred Hutchinson Oncology Center, in Seattle, USA, told the newspaper. He also analyzed the almost complete sequence deposited in the American database. “It’s important to keep in mind 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 state-owned. Despite uploading the viral sequence, she did not publish it, and the sequence was deleted on January 16, 2020. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), owners of the database, asked the reason for the deletion at the time, but Ren did not answer. She is the beneficiary of American funds mediated 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 policies are science-based, effective and consistent with China's national realities. They will stand the test of history.”
Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican congresswoman from Washington and leader of the investigative committee, commented that her country “cannot trust any of the so-called 'facts' or data provided by the Chinese Communist Party” and that it must “seriously question the legitimacy of any scientific theories based on this type of information.”
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