by Will Jones, Daily Sceptic:
It’s being reported that a China-based researcher had mapped the COVID-19 sequence by December 26th 2019, two weeks before the Chinese Government published the sequence. U.S. Republicans have said this raises questions about what other crucial pandemic information Beijing may have concealed. The Epoch Times has more.
Documents released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee reveal that Ren Lili, a current Beijing-based recipient of U.S. federal grants through the New York nonprofit research group EcoHealth Alliance, uploaded COVID-19 sequencing data to a U.S. Government genetic database on December 28th 2019.
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At the time, Chinese authorities were still calling the disease an unknown pneumonia and ordered health workers not to spread any information around it with threat of penalty.
It wasn’t until January 12th — more than two weeks later — that Beijing shared genetic makeup with the World Health Organisation. It took two more days before the regime acknowledged the disease could spread from human to human.
National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) GenBank repository, which received the data from Ms. Ren, notified the Chinese virologist that the submission was “incomplete” and “lacked the necessary information required for publication,” the Department of Health and Human Services told the House committee in a letter.
Following a quality review process that screens for technical details, the GenBank asked for additional information from Ms. Ren, who works at the state-run Institute of Pathogen Biology, but never heard back, leading to the sequence’s removal from the database on January 16th 2020. During this period, GenBank received a near-identical COVID-19 genetic sequence from a different submitter, which it published on January 12th 2020, according to the letter that the Energy and Commerce Committee released on January 17th this year.
I’m not convinced this incriminates the Chinese Government in the way critics are claiming. The mainstream lab leak narrative — as advanced by, for example, U.S. Republicans and Robert Kadlec in his Muddy Waters report — claims that the Chinese were fully aware of the virus leaking during autumn 2019 and had already taken numerous actions, including developing vaccines, but were covering it all up. This discovery that a Chinese researcher uploaded the sequence to an American database on December 28th 2019 would seem completely inconsistent with that; at any rate, no one had told her. Personally, I largely share Philippe Lemoine’s take on the Chinese ‘cover up’, that there is no real evidence they knew what they were dealing with and were trying to stop the world finding out. Rather, they seem to have been clueless, as they discovered the virus during December 2019 in Wuhan hospital patients and then tried to work out what was going on. I’d already wondered why, if the Chinese were covering it up, the WIV’s Shi Zhengli published a paper with the sequence in mid-January alongside that of RaTG13 and noted that the new virus didn’t appear to have evolved naturally from the existing sample she held — not the greatest cover-up technique. To learn that a researcher had uploaded the sequence to an American database in late December only reinforces this picture of a lack of cover-up.
Meanwhile, new ‘smoking gun’ claims have appeared in the form of an X thread — quickly removed for reasons that are unclear — from molecular biologist Valentin Bruttel arguing that new details of the 2018 DEFUSE project show that it really was the blueprint for creating SARS-CoV-2. The ‘Naked Emperor’ offers a summary of Bruttel’s argument from Jan Hommel, translated from the Dutch.
