from Vigilant News:
“This was unethical, unconscionable and unforgivable.”
Guest post by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.
A Chinese researcher with ties to China’s government and military — and to Dr. Anthony Fauci — mapped the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 and submitted it to a U.S. government database in December 2019, two weeks before the virus’ sequence was officially revealed.
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The delay may have worsened the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, some experts said.
The revelations arise from documents the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) provided to the U.S. House of Representatives Energy & Commerce Committee last month as part of an ongoing investigation into the origins of COVID-19. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) first reported the story on Jan. 17.
The researcher, Dr. Lili Ren, is affiliated with the Institute of Pathogen Biology in Beijing which, according to a statement by the committee, has ties to the Chinese Community Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army of China.
According to the WSJ, the institute is part of the state-affiliated Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.
The documents show that Ren was on the payroll of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the agency overseeing the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), directed at the time by Fauci.
“The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has confirmed that Dr. Ren’s December 28, 2019 sequence was nearly identical to the sequence later made public by the China CDC on January 10, 2020, which at the time was the first known sequence,” the committee said in its statement.
The documents raise “questions anew about what China knew in the pandemic’s crucial early days,” the WSJ said.
But according to investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, writing for The Disinformation Chronicle, “The disclosures call into further question what officials at the [NIH] knew about research they were funding in China where the pandemic began.”
Ren was on the payroll of the NIH in December 2019, according to a grant awarded to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit operated by Peter Daszak, Thacker reported. The NIH awarded the grant in 2014 for a multi-year project, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
“The grant shows that taxpayers paid Ren a salary, although NIH redacted the amounts for salary and benefits,” Thacker wrote, referencing the documents obtained as part of the committee’s investigation.
HHS released the documents after the committee threatened to subpoena the agency, the New York Post reported.
According to a Dec. 21, 2023, letter by HHS to the committee, Ren submitted the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 to GenBank, a database operated by the NIH, on Dec. 28, 2019. However, the sequence, which according to the WSJ was the nearly complete sequence of COVID-19, was not published and was subsequently deleted from the database.
“Dr. Ren’s submission was missing some of the technical (not scientific) information required for publication on GenBank,” the committee stated. “She was notified by NIH staff on December 31, 2019, that her submission would be deleted without the additional information.”
The Post reported that Ren’s submission “was nearly identical to what Beijing eventually presented to the World Health Organization on January 11, 2020.” According to HHS, “The sequence published on January 12, 2020, was nearly identical to the sequence that was submitted by Lili Ren” on Dec. 28, 2019.
The committee noted that “Dr. Ren’s sequence is not the first instance of Chinese researchers attempting to delete early SARS-CoV-2 sequences posted to GenBank, but it is the earliest known one,” adding that “China has consistently stated that it published the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 as soon as it was available.”
“Chinese officials at that time were still publicly describing the disease outbreak in Wuhan, China, as a viral pneumonia ‘of unknown cause’ and had yet to close the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, site of one of the initial COVID-19 outbreaks,” the WSJ reported.
‘Unethical, unconscionable, and unforgivable’
According to the WSJ, “The extra two weeks could have proved crucial in helping the international medical community pinpoint how COVID-19 spread, develop medical defenses and get started on an eventual vaccine.”
