Fact Check: Did China Delete COVID-19 Data As Cover-Up?

Most of the world suspect that COVID-19 originated in China’s Wuhan city.

There have also been murmurs about China destroying evidence on coronavirus to support its claim that the deadly virus didn’t originate in the country.

Now, a researcher has claimed precisely that.

According to a new study, around a dozen coronavirus test sequences — taken during the early months of coronavirus pandemic outbreak — were removed from an international database used to track evolution of the novel coronavirus Sars-CoV-2 so that the investigation into its origin could be impeded.

“The fact that such an informative data set was deleted has implications beyond those gleaned directly from the recovered sequences. Samples from early outpatients in Wuhan are a gold mine for anyone seeking to understand the spread of the virus,” said Jesse Bloom, a virologist and evolutionary biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

Bloom, author of the peer-reviewed report titled ‘Recovery of Deleted Deep Sequencing Data Sheds More Light on the Early Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 Epidemic’, said that he identified a data set containing Sars-CoV-2 sequences that had been deleted from National Institutes of Health’s Sequence read archive.

Bloom managed to recover the deleted files from Google Cloud and then reconstructed partial sequences of 13 viruses from the early cases.

Also Read: COVID Origin Probe: China Refuses To Provide Data On Early Cases, Says WHO

According to the report, sequences from Huanan Seafood Market, that were part of the joint report prepared by World Health Organization (WHO) and China, are not “fully representative of viruses in Wuhan early in the epidemic.”

Bloom’s research found that Sars-Cov-2 was circulating in Wuhan before it was detected at local wet markets, including the Huanan Seafood Market.

“There is no plausible scientific reason for the deletion… It therefore seems likely the sequences were deleted to obscure their existence,” the report said.

“Particularly in light of the directive that labs destroy early samples… and multiple orders requiring approval of publications on (COVID-19), this suggests a less than wholehearted effort to trace early spread of the epidemic,” it added.