WWhile Chinese officials were still talking about a viral pneumonia of unknown cause in January 2020, the genetic makeup of Sars-CoV-2 was already known – and an almost complete version had even been uploaded to a research database in the USA by a researcher, such as “Wall Street Journal” reports. However, it was never published, but was deleted according to the intended procedure after questions about it were not answered by the researcher.
The researcher, who works at the Beijing Institute for the Biology of Pathogens, which in turn belongs to the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and is affiliated with the National Health Commission of China, has now left questions about this unanswered. Due to the censorship of the Beijing regime, researchers are not free to communicate anyway, especially when it comes to questions about the early phase of the pandemic.
The incident came to light through an investigation by a US House of Representatives committee into the origins of Covid. It confirms posts on Chinese social media from early 2020 as well as a – later deleted – report from the Chinese magazine Caixin from February 2020, according to which samples had already been sequenced in December 2019 and identified as SARS-like.
Vaccine development delayed
The fact that the US database did not publish the virus sequence in view of the open questions cannot be blamed on it, wrote virologist Jesse Bloom from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle in a comment on the online platform Github. But the delay was very unfortunate: Since the data already included the complete sequence of the Sars-CoV-2 spike protein, the necessary information for the development of vaccines would have been available much earlier.
According to Bloom's assessment, the sequence does not contain any new information on the question of virus origin because it is identical to sequences published later. But “it clearly refutes the Chinese government’s statement that the cause of the Wuhan pneumonia outbreak was not yet identified at the end of the first week of January 2020.”
The case once again highlights the importance of rapid data sharing during infectious disease outbreaks, “as immediate release of the sequence could have accelerated the development of vaccines against Covid-19 by several weeks,” writes Bloom. He told the Wall Street Journal that the incident underscored “how careful we must be with the truth of information published by the Chinese government.”
According to the newspaper, Chinese experts met with WHO officials on January 3, 2020, but did not share their knowledge about the new coronavirus as the cause of the outbreak. It was only on January 9, 2020 that the WHO announced that, according to Beijing, it was caused by a new coronavirus – the first sequence was finally published on January 11.
The Chinese Embassy in the US said Beijing's Covid measures were “science-based, effective and consistent with China's national realities,” according to the Wall Street Journal. They would “stand the test of history.”
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