Chinese scientists knew the genetic makeup of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the COVID-19 pandemic, two weeks before sharing it with the rest of the world, according to a new report.
The delay, according to a press release issued Wednesday by the U. S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, has cost the world significant time to prepare, likely worsening the impact of the virus and the death toll, which as of Dec. 31 topped 7 million.
Shortly after the arrival of 2021, U. S. President Joe Biden ordered an investigation into the virus, adding a link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biosafety point four laboratory located in the city in Hubei province, where the outbreak in China appears to have started. Last year, Biden signed a bill requiring government entities to declassify and percentage-free data on this potential link.
Wednesday’s revelation suggests that the Chinese government had mapped the virus’s genome a full two weeks before publishing it and three weeks before publicly confirming human-to-human transmission.
Documents published by the Energy and Commerce Committee showed that the viral sequence in the possession of a Beijing-based scientist was almost identical to the one later disseminated by the Chinese government.
Beijing said it had made public the genetic sequence of the virus as soon as it was decoded.
The previous series was submitted to the National Institutes of Health’s GenBank gene series database via virologist Lili Ren, a researcher at the Institute of Pathogen Biology of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, an institution linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
However, on December 31, 2019, the NIH informed Ren that his submission lacked some required technical data and would be deleted if this data was not provided.
“Complete feature annotation has not been included for some or all of the sequences you have submitted,” the redacted letter provided to the committee by the NIH said, among other documents.
The Department of Health and Human Services showed that Ren’s genome is the same as the one shared through the Chinese Center for Disease Control on Jan. 11, 2020, according to the news release.
Newsweek has contacted the NIH and the White House for written comment.
“This vital additional finding underscores why we cannot accept as true any of the so-called ‘facts’ or insights provided through the CCP and seriously questions the legitimacy of any clinical theory based on such information,” the committee’s press release reads. .
Committee members, the White House, the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the NIH had blocked their investigation into the origins of the virus.
Biden’s leadership “obstructed and delayed congressional investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, refused to produce these images for more than seven months, and only turned them over to the [Energy and Commerce] committee after the committee threatened to subpoena the images,” he said.
“HHS has systematically and voluntarily provided Congress with thousands of pages of documents, as well as the expertise of officials, as part of its efforts to promote transparency and about the origins of COVID-19,” an HHS spokesperson told Newsweek on Thursday.
The spokesperson said the ministry “remains to do valuable bipartisan work to address the Chinese government’s lack of transparency” and is giving researchers access to data on the origin of COVID to prevent further pandemics.
His letter to NIH Acting Director Lawrence Tabak is attached to the committee’s press release, dated Sept. 28, 2023.
The letter threatened to include a subpoena after months with no sign of the NIH cooperating with the committee’s request for documents related to early SARS-CoV-2 sequences, data from early COVID cases, and other similar information.
Update 1/18/24 12:13 p. m. ET: This article has been updated with more information.
Update 01/18/24 10:30 p.m. ET: This article was updated with a statement from an HHS spokesperson.
Micah McCartney is a reporter for Newsweek in Taipei, Taiwan. It covers U. S. -China relations, security issues in East and Southeast Asia, and China-Taiwan ties. Send Micah tips or suggestions to m. mccartney@newsweek. com.