Chinese scientist revealed Covid sequence weeks ahead of official release: US committee

According to federal documents provided with a US congressional committee and made public on Wednesday, a Chinese scientist attempted to publish the genetic profile of the coronavirus two weeks before Beijing formally revealed the information. The development of diagnostics, therapies, and vaccinations to fight the virus may have been hampered by the delay. The Washington Post reports that while experts cautioned that the report does not provide substantive insight into the pandemic’s origins, it raises new questions about how Chinese officials and scientists shared information in the early days of the virus as it quickly spread throughout their country. A virologist at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences’ Institute of Pathogen Biology in Beijing submitted the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s genetic sequence to GenBank, a freely accessible database of genetic sequences managed by the US National Institutes of Health, on December 28, 2019. Three days later, the submission was highlighted by GenBank’s review procedure. Ren was notified via email that her submission was incomplete and that more annotations were required. On January 16, 2020, Ren’s submission was removed from GenBank’s processing queue because Ren failed to resubmit the data with the necessary annotations. On January 12, 2020, a different group of Chinese researchers submitted a “nearly identical” genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 to GenBank. This was stated in a letter that House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders received from Melanie Anne Egorin, a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services, which was made public on Wednesday. An email seeking comment was sent to Ren on Wednesday, but he did not answer right away. Republicans in Congress who have been looking into the origins of the coronavirus outbreak have made her submission and the email responses she received from GenBank available. Public health experts who examined the documents said the experience showed how there was a chance to find out more information about the virus early on in the global health emergency. Days before Bloom and other experts said they began closely monitoring the novel respiratory virus outbreak in China, Ren attempted to publish the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 in December 2019. However, it was never made publicly available to the researchers and laboratory personnel who browse GenBank, which according to federal officials has more than 3.8 billion published records. Chairs of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), and Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) stated in a statement that the discovery raises more concerns about how honest Chinese officials have been about the virus. (With agency inputs)