More proof the Chinese covered up Covid: Congress investigation finds Beijing was studying virus weeks before it told the world
- The sequence of the virus was uploaded to the database and cleaned shortly afterwards
- Knowing the genetic makeup of Covid could have provided valuable response time
- READ MORE: Chinese scientists ‘create’ a Covid strain with a 100% death rate in mice
Chinese scientists mapped the genetic makeup of the pandemic-causing coronavirus nearly a month before it was made public, raising questions about what those scientists knew and when they knew it.
A congressional committee has obtained federal government documents showing that Dr. Lili Ren, a scientist at the Beijing-based Institute for Pathogen Biology, on December 28 sequenced the new virus, which at the time the government called viral pneumonia ‘of unknown cause’ was mentioned.
It confirms suspicions that the Chinese studied the virus before announcing it to the world – a delay that experts say cost countless lives.
A Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded a nearly complete sequence of the virus’s structure to a US government-run database on December 28, 2019, weeks before it was made public to global scientists.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a senior member of the Republican-led Energy and Commerce Committee, said China was deliberately withholding crucial information
The fully sequenced virus – which would have allowed scientists to start developing drugs and vaccines and given them a better understanding of how the virus behaves – was only made available to the World Health Organization on January 11.
Dr. Ren uploaded the genetic mapping of the virus to a National Institutes of Health database, but the first known publication came on January 11.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also said the virus sequence was shared with the Chinese equivalent of the CDC on January 5, but was not released to scientists worldwide.
The latest revelation from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over health matters, adds to a long list of indications that the Chinese government has covered up valuable information about the virus, its origins and its widespread spread.
Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, told the Wall Street Journal: ‘(It) underlines how careful we must be about the accuracy of the information released by the Chinese government.
“It’s important to keep in mind how little we know.”
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a senior member of the Republican-led Energy and Commerce Committee, said China was deliberately withholding crucial information. Since then, well over a million people have died and even more have become seriously ill.
The Republican said the fact that Chinese scientists sequenced the virus long before it was made public shows that the US “cannot trust any of the CCP’s so-called ‘facts’ or data and undermines the legitimacy of any scientific theory-based theories are seriously questioned. on such information.’
Dr. Ren is documented in contractual documents as a participant in a US-funded project. This project aims to investigate the transmission of coronaviruses from animals to humans.
After uploading the series to the NIH database, Dr. Ren deleted it on January 16 when the US agency pressed her to ask more questions about her findings. On January 12, NIH received and published a SARS-CoV-2 sequence from another source.
Her research, which collected samples from bats in China, was overseen by the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which came to global attention in the wake of the pandemic for its role in funding “risky” research at the WIV before Covid emerged.
Since then, the EcoHealth Alliance has emerged, providing WIV with $3.3 million for experiments.
While the committee’s findings do not provide details on the potential that the coronavirus could have resulted from research that has made the virus more virulent and/or transmissible, the seemingly deliberate move to obscure those details delayed much-needed time to prevent its spread across to contain the US. .