RECORDS of early Covid-19 cases in Wuhan were scrubbed from a US database at the request of Chinese scientists, officials have confirmed.
A team of academics from the coronavirus epicentre in Hube, Central China, submitted sequences of the virus that causes the disease to a US-based archive in March 2020.
But three months later they asked for those sequences to be removed and the data were deleted, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) said.
This confirms the results of an investigation by biologist Jesse Bloom.
It also comes after a shocking new study that China deleted Covid data to cover up ‘Patient Zero’ amid growing suspicions globally that the virus leaked from a lab.
Explosive new claims have emerged that China deleted information about the origins of the virus that could have provided vital clues.
NIH said in a statement: “Submitting investigators hold the rights to their data and can request withdrawal of the data.”
The deleted data did not prove how Covid-19 first infected humans.
It also does not indicated whether via animals or a laboratory leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But experts said the incident shows how Chinese researchers and officials have not been fully transparent about the pandemic’s origins.
Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, said: “The findings do not shed direct light on the issue of origins.
“The results do not rule out a natural-spillover origin and do not rule in a laboratory-spillover origin.”
But he added: “[They do] provide evidence of deliberate obfuscation of early events in the emergence of Sars-Cov-2 in Wuhan in fall 2019 and evidence of deliberate obstruction of the investigation of those events.”
Scientists want to know how the pandemic began so another one can be prevented.
Yesterday a shocking new study revealed explosive new claims that have emerged that China deleted information about the origins of the virus that could have provided vital clues.
It also suggests that the early Covid viruses investigated by the World Health Organisation are not fully representative of the virus strains circulating in the early months.
The research paper, “Recovery of deleted deep sequencing data sheds more light on the early Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 epidemic”, was released by Professor Jesse Bloom, an associate professor at the Seattle-based Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center.
