At the time, Chinese authorities were still calling the disease an unknown pneumonia and threatened most health workers into silence.
A China-based researcher had already mapped the COVID-19 sequence two weeks before China’s ruling communist regime revealed such details to the world, raising questions about what other crucial pandemic information Beijing may have buried from view.
Documents released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee reveal that Ren Lili, a Beijing-based recipient of U.S. federal grants through the New York nonprofit research group EcoHealth Alliance who remains a current subgrantee, uploaded COVID-19 sequencing data to a U.S. government genetic database on Dec. 28, 2019.
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 Jan. 12—more than two weeks later—that Beijing shared genetic makeup with the World Health Organization. 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 Jan. 16, 2020. During this period, GenBank received a near-identical COVID-19 genetic sequence from a different submitter, which it published on Jan. 12, 2020, according to the letter that the Energy and Commerce Committee released on Jan. 17 this year.
In contrast with the Chinese regime’s insistence that it has been transparent on the COVID origin issue, the newly unearthed information suggested otherwise, Committee Republicans said.
“This significant discovery further underscores why we cannot trust any of the so-called ‘facts’ or data provided by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and calls into serious question the legitimacy of any scientific theories based on such information,” committee chair McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), Subcommittee on Health chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), and Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations chair Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), said in a joint statement.
By Eva Fu
Read Full Article on TheEpochTimes.com
Chinese Lab Mapped Deadly Coronavirus Two Weeks Before Beijing Told the World, Documents Show (The Wall Street Journal)
