A Chinese scientist sought to publish the genetic profile of the coronavirus two weeks before Beijing formally released the sequence, according to federal documents shared with a congressional committee and released Wednesday. The delay may have slowed researchers’ work on tests, treatments and vaccines to combat the virus. The report raises new questions about how Chinese officials and scientists shared information in the earliest days of the pandemic as the virus quickly spread through their country, although experts cautioned that it does not offer substantive insight into the pandemic’s origins.
On Dec. 28, 2019, Lili Ren, a virologist at the Institute of Pathogen Biology of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing, submitted a genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to GenBank, a publicly accessible database of genetic sequences overseen by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. GenBank’s review process flagged the submission three days later, alerting Ren in an email that her submission was incomplete and requesting that she provide additional annotations. Ren’s submission was deleted from GenBank’s processing queue on Jan. 16, 2020, after Ren did not resubmit the information with the requested annotations.
A separate team of Chinese researchers submitted a “nearly identical” genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 to GenBank that was published on Jan. 12, 2020. That was according to a letter that Melanie Anne Egorin, a senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services, sent to House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders and that was made public Wednesday. Ren did not immediately respond to an email Wednesday requesting comment. Her submission and emailed replies from GenBank were released by congressional Republicans who have been investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
Public health experts who reviewed the documents said the episode illustrated a missed opportunity to learn more about the virus at the beginning of the global health emergency. The failure to publish the genetic sequence submitted by Ren is “retroactively painful,” said Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. Bloom noted that researchers were depending on genetic sequences to begin developing medical interventions to combat the coronavirus and argued that earlier access to the information would have expedited new tests and vaccines.
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