(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) It was revealed that researchers in China identified and mapped the COVID-19 virus weeks before the communist state informed the world about the news.
The recently discovered information raised serious concerns about the country’s transparency regarding the initial outbreak of the virus, according to Blaze Media.
A researcher from China uploaded a nearly complete sequence of the COVID-19 virus structure to the U.S. National Institute of Health’s (NIH) database on Dec. 28, 2019 — two weeks before China officially notified the world about the virus — according to the documents that were obtained by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The Chinese researcher who has been identified as Dr. Lili Ren was working as a virologist at the Institute of Pathogen Biology of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing, an organization that has ties to the Chinese Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army.
“[Ren is a] current subgrantee of the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance on the same National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) grant as the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV),” the Republican lawmakers added.
When Ren tried to publish the genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to GenBank — a comprehensive database of genetic sequences that is publicly available and operated by the NIH — GenBank notified Ren three days later via email that her submission was incomplete and that she needed to provide additional annotations.
Eventually, Ren’s genetic sequencing was deleted from GenBank’s processing queue on Jan. 16, 2020, even though a different team of Chinese researchers was allowed to submit a nearly identical genetic sequence to GenBank that was published on Jan. 12, 2020, according to a letter that was sent to the House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders from Melanie Anne Egorin – a senior official at the HHS.
The World Health Organization was notified by China about the COVID-19 sequence only on Jan. 12, 2020.
Interestingly enough, the Biden administration, the NIH and the HHS have “obstructed and delayed Congressional investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2” and “refused to produce this sequence for over seven months,” Republicans claimed.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee received the sequence only after it had threatened subpoenas.
“This significant discovery further underscores why we cannot trust any of the so-called ‘facts’ or data provided by the CCP and calls into serious question the legitimacy of any scientific theories based on such information,” Committee Chair Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., and Morgan Griffith, R-Va., said.
