In a surprising turn of events, evidence reveals that a Chinese research team submitted the SARS-CoV-2 genome to a U.S. database on December 28, 2019, almost two weeks before another sequence went public, initiating the global race for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.
The disclosure, reported by The Wall Street Journal, renews suspicions of a potential cover-up by Chinese officials regarding early coronavirus sequences. Lawmakers are now questioning whether the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) GenBank database should implement a system to flag urgent public health submissions. Notably, the NIH marked the researcher's submission as incomplete and deleted the sequence before it became public.
Virologist Jeremy Kamil of Louisiana State University Health Shreveport expressed regret over the missed opportunity, stating, "The never-completed GenBank submission was a huge missed opportunity to start developing drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines earlier."
The Republican-led Commerce committee, investigating the pandemic's origins, suggested that the early submission raises questions about how soon the Chinese Communist Party was aware of the virus and if information was withheld. However, Chinese media reported in February 2020 that multiple companies had sequenced the virus before the government publicized it.
The committee released a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), revealing that virologist Lili Ren from the Institute of Pathogen Biology in Beijing submitted the sequence. Despite NIH's request for more details, Ren never responded, leading to the automatic deletion of the sequence on January 16, 2020.
The first public SARS-CoV-2 sequence was published by Fudan University virologist Yong-Zhen Zhang and University of Sydney biologist Edward Holmes on January 10. HHS's letter mentions another Chinese researcher submitting a nearly identical sequence to GenBank on January 12.
Computational virologist Jesse Bloom found that Ren's GenBank submission matched a sequence from a 65-year-old man in Wuhan. Some scientists lament the two-week delay in publicizing the sequence, noting that earlier disclosure could have expedited vaccine and diagnostic development.
While Ren's submission had an embargo, typical for researchers awaiting publication, questions arise about why she did not make the sequence public promptly. Holmes sees this as a sign of initial openness rather than a cover-up. However, some propose improving GenBank's quality control process to automatically flag submissions with potential public health significance. NCBI, the agency overseeing GenBank, generally prioritizes submissions related to potential outbreaks only after a public health emergency is declared, which did not occur until late January 2020.
