Years of research on the dangers of coronaviruses, and the broader history of lab accidents and errors around the world, provided scientists with plenty of reasons to proceed with caution as they investigated this class of pathogens. But troubling safety practices persisted.
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The National Institutes of Health defended its decision to delete its record of the genetic sequencing of COVID-19 cases from early in the coronavirus pandemic, apparently done at the request of Chinese researchers.
The revelation was revealed by a U.S. virologist who discovered the information was scrubbed from the NIH database.
This comes as the United States and its allies seek to determine if the virus sprang from a mysterious lab in Wuhan, China, which stymied an earlier investigation by the World Health Organization dismissing the lab theory.
“Here I identify a data set containing SARS-CoV-2 sequences from early in the Wuhan epidemic that has been deleted from the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive, noted Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in a scientific paper released Tuesday. I recover the deleted files from the Google Cloud, and reconstruct partial sequences of 13 early epidemic viruses.”