Scientist has discovered that some of the first COVID footage in China has been erased

A prestigious American scientist, Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Research Center in Seattle, discovered that some genomic sequences of the first cases of COVID in the Chinese city of Wuhan had disappeared from an international database, the newspaper reports today. The country, from Spain.

In a solitary detective work, this biochemist deduced the names of the files and was able to recover the information deleted because it had also been uploaded to the Google Cloud platform, a virtual storage space. “It seems likely that the sequences were deleted to hide their existence,” said the researcher in a draft of his conclusions.

“It seems likely that the footage was deleted to hide its existence”

Although he has been questioned by colleagues, Bloom assures that the 13 partial sequences he managed to piece together show mutations that suggest the virus was already circulating in Wuhan before the December 2019 epidemic in the Huanan market. His research is controversial and has not yet been reviewed by other scientists. It highlights three mutations present in coronaviruses on the market, but absent in the currently saved sequences and in the bat viruses linked to SARS-CoV-2.

Some specialists believe that this new information is essential. Geneticist Rasmus Nielsen, of the University of California at Berkeley, said in his social networks that “this is the most important data on the origin of COVID for more than a year”, specifies the Spanish media.

“It makes a lot of noise with little real straw, all to conclude that the pandemic did not start in the Wuhan market, which was already known, and that the virus circulated earlier than has been said , as always happens in a new epidemic “

However, other experts, such as geneticist Fernando González Candelas, are skeptical. “It makes a lot of noise with little real straw, all to conclude that the pandemic did not start in the Wuhan market, which was already known, and that the virus circulated earlier than we have known. said, as always happens in a new epidemic, “said the professor of the University of Valencia. “Deleting sequences from a database is not usual, but we’ll have to see why it was done. Given the speculation, this is a good weapon for any conspiracy theory, ”he added.

They said the files had been deleted from the SRA database, owned by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The body, a government agency, explained in the last hours that it deleted the footage in June 2020 at the request from a Chinese researcher who had the rights to them. The scientist indicated that the information had been updated, that he wanted to send it to another database, and that he wanted to remove the first version to avoid confusion.

Bloom’s research indicates that the samples are being collected by Chinese pharmacist Aisi Fu at Renmin Hospital at Wuhan University. Aisi Fu and his colleagues then did not hide the material, quite the contrary: they used the information to develop a test for the coronavirus and published a draft of their results on March 6, 2020. And a year ago , they published their final conclusions in the specialized journal Small, a study with partial information on the sequences which, with an unusual format and in a minority magazine, went unnoticed.

The country indicates that Bloom and the magazine Science They attempted to obtain the version from Chinese researchers without success and the American biochemist did not find the deleted sequences in any other database.

Jesse Bloom belongs to a group of 18 renowned scientists who called on May 13 for “a real investigation” into the origin of the pandemic. In the opinion of these specialists, “both the theory of an accidental escape from a laboratory and that of a natural jump of animals are still possible”.