Republican Senators Demand NIH Director Release Details Surrounding Deletion of COVID-19 Data

Republican Senators have sent a letter to the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) demanding he disclose all details surrounding the deletion of the COVID-19 data from its key database. National Review obtained the letter from Senators Marsha Blackburn, Chuck Grassley and Roger Marshall.

The letter asks Director Francis Collins multiple questions regarding the omitted data and the Institute’s motives behind deleting the data. Last week the Wall Street Journal reported Chinese researchers instructed the NIH to remove gene sequences of early COVID carriers from the database called the NIH Sequence Read Archive.

Wuhan Institute of Virology

Deleted data included sequences of extracted samples from patients hospitalized in Wuhan from the beginning stages of the pandemic. The patients were believed to have contracted COVID in January and February of 2020.

National Review reports the Senators’ letter “implored Collins to publish the names of the collaborating partners to the NIH Sequence Read Archive, the Chinese scientists that made the original request for deletion, the personnel with the authority to delete data, and the history and record of data deletion directed by researchers affiliated with the Chinese regime.”

Specifically, the letter reads, “the efforts by Chinese researchers to delete the data demands additional explanation. As you are aware, the Chinese government has failed, from the beginning, to be open and transparent with the world with respect to its role in the pandemic.”

National Review reports that Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, “was able to recover the deleted files from the Google Cloud and reconstruct partial sequences of 13 early epidemic viruses.”

“The data Bloom uncovered led him to believe that the pathogen was circulating in Wuhan before it presented itself at the Huanan fish market, which scientific consensus had considered the location of the first COVID outbreak until the lab-accident theory started gaining traction in the mainstream.”

Senators urge in their letter, “the American people deserve to know what their government knows about the origins of this global illness.”