Chinese researchers reportedly identified and mapped the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which caused the deadly Covid-19 pandemic and continues to spread globally, at least two weeks before China officially notified the world about it, according to media reports.
Federal documents from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) shared with a US congressional committee have raised concerns about China’s transparency regarding when and how much information it had about the virus, and the resulting delay in developing tests and treatments.
Congressional investigators stated that a Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded an incomplete sequence of the virus’s structure to a US government-run database in December 2019, a time when Chinese officials were publicly attributing the disease outbreak in Wuhan to a viral pneumonia of unknown cause, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
On December 28, 2019, Lili Ren, a virologist at the Institute of Pathogen Biology of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing, submitted a genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to GenBank, a publicly accessible genetic sequence database overseen by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Three days later, GenBank notified Ren via email that her submission was incomplete and requested the complete information, according to the Washington Post. As Ren did not provide the requested annotations, her submission was deleted from GenBank’s processing queue on January 16, 2020.
A letter from Melanie Anne Egorin, a senior official at the HHS, sent to House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders and made public on Wednesday, revealed that a “nearly identical” genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was submitted to GenBank by another team of Chinese researchers and published on January 12, 2020.
Public health experts who reviewed the documents expressed concerns, as they believed this was a missed opportunity to gather crucial information about the virus at the onset of the global health emergency, according to the Washington Post. Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, stated that the failure to publish Ren’s genetic sequence was “retroactively painful,” emphasizing that these genetic sequences could have accelerated the development of new tests and vaccines to combat the coronavirus.
“That two weeks would have made a tangible difference in quite a few people’s lives,” Bloom said.
The origins of Covid-19 are still uncertain more than three years into the pandemic, sparking both political and scientific debates worldwide. Scientists and politicians globally are in disagreement, with some proposing that the coronavirus originated from contact with an infected animal, while others suggest it could be linked to an incident in a laboratory.
“I don’t think this submission tells us anything about the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Bloom said. “What I think this shows … (is) the Chinese government wasn’t immediately transparent about how quickly they learned about the cause of this outbreak.”
