Documents show Chinese lab mapped deadly coronavirus two weeks before Beijing announced it to the world

Chinese researchers isolated and mapped the virus that causes Covid-19 in late December 2019, at least two weeks before Beijing revealed details of the deadly virus to the world, US Congressional researchers said, raising new questions about what China knew in the crucial early days. of the pandemic.

Documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) by a House committee and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show that a Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded a nearly complete sequence of the virus’s structure into a database maintained by the U.S. government on December 28, 2019. At the time, Chinese authorities were still publicly describing the outbreak in Wuhan, China, as viral pneumonia “of unknown cause” and had not yet closed the Huanan seafood wholesale market, the site of one of the first Covid-19 outbreaks.

China only shared the virus sequence with the World Health Organization on January 11, 2020, according to the U.S. government’s pandemic timeline.

The new information does not shed light on the debate over whether Covid originated in an infected animal or a lab leak, but suggests the world still lacks a complete explanation of the origin of the pandemic.

The extra two weeks could have proved crucial in helping the international medical community identify how Covid-19 spread, develop medical defenses and begin a possible vaccine, specialists said. In late 2019, scientists and governments around the world raced to understand the mysterious disease that would eventually be called Covid-19 and would kill millions and render many more.

This “underscores how careful we need to be about the accuracy of information released by the Chinese government,” said Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, who reviewed the documents and the newly discovered genetic sequence. “It is important to take into account the little knowledge we have. »

The Chinese researcher who presented the virus sequence, Dr. Lili Ren of the Beijing-based Institute of Pathogen Biology, did not respond to an email seeking comment. The institute is part of the state-affiliated Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.

“China has continued to refine its Covid response based on science to make it more targeted,” a Chinese embassy spokesperson said. “China’s Covid response policies are scientifically based, effective and consistent with China’s national realities. “They can stand the test of history.”

The documents outlining a new timeline were obtained by Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee after the committee threatened to subpoena HHS.

Melanie Egorin, HHS deputy secretary for legislation, wrote last month to committee chairwoman Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) that Ren had submitted the virus sequence on Dec. 28, 2019, to a database of genetic data, GenBank, managed by the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The first known publication of the sequence of the Covid virus, called SARS-CoV-2, took place on January 11, 2020, after Chinese authorities shared the information with the World Health Organization. Furthermore, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of Atlanta indicate that the virus sequence is located in China with the Chinese equivalent of the CDC and 5 of energy, but it is not known at the global level. the scientists.

The sequence provided by Ren in December 2019 was never published and was deleted from the database on January 16, 2020, after the NIH, following its protocols, requested more technical details and it did not did not respond, wrote Egorin. It is unclear why Ren did not respond.

On January 12, the NIH received and released a SARS-CoV-2 sequence from another source.

“The footage released on January 12, 2020 was almost identical to the footage presented by Lili Ren,” Egorin told the committee.

The discovery that a researcher at China’s state-affiliated laboratory had isolated and mapped the virus well before Beijing publicly revealed that it had done so shows that the United States “cannot trust any of its self- saying “facts” or data provided by the United States. CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and seriously questions the legitimacy of any scientific theory based on such information,” McMorris Rodgers said in a statement. The committee spent months investigating the origins of Covid, U.S. government funding for overseas research and other issues.

Having information about the virus two weeks earlier “would have helped in the early stages of the outbreak,” including implementing a more effective testing program, said Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University.

Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, wrote on the GitHub platform that “the immediate public release of the sequence could have accelerated by several weeks the development of vaccines against Covid-19 which were saving thousands of lives per week in the United States. United “. alone.” .

HHS and NIH did not respond to requests for comment on why information about Ren’s presentation had not been made public sooner.

While the existence of a precise sequence of the Covid virus in a US database was not previously known, Ren has written in the past about his search for the causes of Covid. In a May 2020 article in the Chinese Medical Journal, a scientific publication, she and her colleagues described how samples were taken from five patients at a hospital in Wuhan, China, between December 18 and 29, 2019. Sequencing, they wrote, revealed the presence of a novel coronavirus “associated with severe and fatal respiratory illnesses in humans.”

Ren is listed in contract documents as a collaborator on a U.S.-funded project to study how coronaviruses can be transferred from animals to humans. The work, which included collecting samples from bats in China, was overseen by the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.

The Journal previously reported that Chinese specialists met with the World Health Organization in Beijing on January 3, 2020, but did not reveal that the new disease was caused by coronavirus, a fact that Chinese officials already knew.

“This presentation (of the database) shows that in fact, at least on December 28, 2019, scientists in China knew that this pneumonia was caused” by a new coronavirus, said Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Cancer Center. in Seattle.