COV-ER UP BY CHINA

NIH hid virus data

National Institutes of Health acting director Lawrence Tabak confirmed to lawmakers Wednesday that US health officials concealed early genomic sequences of COVID-19 at the request of Chinese scientists — but insisted the data remains on file.

Tabak told a House Appropriations subcommittee that the NIH “eliminated from public view” the data from the pandemic epicenter in Wuhan, China, before adding that researchers can still access it via an archaic “tape drive.”

Vanity Fair recently reported that the information was hidden in response to a request from Chinese scientists, despite potentially resolving whether the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or passed naturally from animals to humans.

Info available

Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) asked Tabak to explain why US officials would comply with such a request.

“There’s no question that the communication that we had about the sequence archive — Sequence Read Archive — could have been improved. I freely admit that,” Tabak said. “If I may, the archive never deleted the sequence, it just did not make it available for interrogation.”

“So wait, you have the information still?” Beutler followed up.

“We have the information . . . Anybody who submits to the Sequence Read Archive is allowed to ask for it to be removed,” Tabak explained. “And that investigator did do that. But we never erase it.”

Clarifying, Tabak said, “We never erase the information. We keep it.”

Later, the congresswoman followed up: “So they were able to withdraw public viewing of it?” “That’s correct,” he said. “OK, so researchers can apply to the NIH and get the information from you?” Beutler asked.

‘Never lost’

In the way that it was originally eliminated from public view, it was withdrawn, and that’s the most difficult for people to access,” Tabak replied. “The error that was made, and we found this out after a review of all of our processes, was it should have been suppressed. The distinction being that if it’s withdrawn, it is kept archivally on a tape drive — old technology, but that’s how it’s done. But when it is withdrawn, it can still be accessed by accession number, and so researchers are able to access that information.”

“So the information is still there?” Beutler summed up.

“That’s correct. The information was never lost,” Tabak repeated.

In a March 31 article, Vanity Fair reported that evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom discovered last year that early COVID-19 sequences had disappeared from a federally run data repository.

China’s government has refused to cooperate with an international investigation of the origins of the pandemic.