Scientist says early coronavirus samples were deleted from NIH database
(CNN)Scientists investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic might be working with the wrong samples, because some early samples of the virus submitted by a Chinese researcher were deleted from a shared database, an expert in the evolution of viruses says.
Jesse Bloom, a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, said he found genetic sequences taken from early coronavirus cases in China that were deleted from a US National Institutes of Health database. Examination shows some of the early cases in the Chinese city of Wuhan are different, genetically, from the variants that eventually spread to cause the pandemic.
The sequences themselves do not shed any more light on the renewed debate about whether the virus spread naturally from animals to humans, or was the result of a laboratory leak, Bloom told CNN.
But he said his analysis shows the samples being used to investigate the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic may not be complete.
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https://us.cnn.com/2021/06/23/health/coronavirus-sequences-database-scientist/index.html