Covid: USA ignored code sent by Chinese – 01/18/2024 – Health

In late December 2019, eight pages of genetic code were uploaded to computers at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, in the United States.

Unknown to U.S. officials at the time, the genetic map that had arrived on their doorstep contained critical clues about the virus that would soon trigger a pandemic.

The genetic code, uploaded by Chinese scientists to a vast public repository of sequencing data run by the U.S. government, described a mysterious new virus that had infected a 65-year-old man weeks earlier in Wuhan, China. At the time the code was sent, Chinese authorities had not yet warned about the unexplained pneumonia that was affecting patients in the central city of Wuhan.

However, the US repository, which was designed to help scientists share common research data, never added the submission it received on December 28, 2019, to its database. Instead, three days later, it asked Chinese scientists to resubmit the code with certain additional technical details. This request went unanswered.

It took nearly two more weeks for a separate pair of virologists, one Australian and one Chinese, to work together to publish the genetic code of the new coronavirus online, triggering a frantic global effort to save lives by building tests and vaccines.

Chinese scientists’ initial attempt to release the crucial code was first revealed in documents released Wednesday by House Republicans investigating the origins of Covid. The documents reinforced questions that have circulated since early 2020 about when China learned of the virus that was causing its unexplained outbreak — and also drew attention to gaps in the U.S. system for monitoring dangerous new viruses.

The Chinese government said it promptly shared the virus’s genetic code with global health authorities. House Republicans said the new documents suggested that was not true. Chinese news reports and social media posts have long reported that the virus was first sequenced in late December 2019.

But lawmakers and independent scientists said the documents offered new and thought-provoking details about when and how scientists tried to share these sequences globally, illustrating the difficulty the United States has in identifying viruses of concern among the thousands of common genetic sequences that are sent daily to your repository.

“You would never have an ambulance sitting in normal 3 p.m. traffic,” said Jeremy Kamil, a virus expert at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Shreveport. Referring to the 2019 coronavirus code, he said, “Why would you allow that sequence to sit there under the same process as a sequence I just received from a new species of snail that I found in a canyon?”

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the NIH, said in a statement Wednesday that the genetic code was not published because it “could not be verified despite NIH’s attempts to obtain more information and a response of the Chinese scientist”.

In an earlier letter to House Republicans, Melanie Anne Egorin, a senior Health Department official, said the sequence had initially been subjected to a “technical but not scientific or public health” review, as was customary. After receiving no response from Chinese scientists regarding the requested corrections, the database, known as GenBank, automatically deleted the submission from its queue of unpublished sequences on January 16, 2020.

It’s unclear why Chinese scientists didn’t respond. One of the scientists, Lili Ren, who worked at a virus institute affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing, did not respond to a request for comment. The Chinese embassy said China’s response was “science-based, effective and consistent with China’s national realities.”

But the same sequence that Ren’s group submitted to GenBank was made public in a different online database known as GISAID on January 12, 2020, shortly after other scientists posted the first coronavirus code. Ren’s group also resubmitted a corrected version of the code to GenBank in early February and published a paper describing their work.

The two-week gap between the code being uploaded to the US database and China sharing the sequence with global health officials “highlights why we cannot trust any of the so-called ‘facts’ or data” from the Chinese government, they said. the Republican leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Jesse Bloom, a virus expert at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, said the genetic sequence would have strongly suggested to anyone reviewing it in late December 2019 that a new coronavirus was causing the mysterious pneumonia cases in Wuhan. Instead, official Chinese timelines indicate that the government did not make this diagnosis until early January.

“If that sequence had been available, probably the prototype vaccines could have been started immediately, and that was two weeks earlier than when they were started,” Bloom said.

The documents, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, provide no information about the origin of the virus, Bloom and other scientists said, given that the sequence contained no special clues about the virus’s evolution and was later made public anyway.

But they offer new details about the pace at which Ren’s team worked to sequence the virus. The swab containing the virus they analyzed was taken from the 65-year-old patient, a vendor at the large market where the disease was first seen spreading, on December 24, 2019. Within four days, the scientists sent back the genetic data of this virus to GenBank.

“This is incredibly fast,” said Kristian Andersen, a virus expert at the Scripps Research Institute.

At the time, finding a new coronavirus in the patient’s sample would not have proven that it was that virus, rather than a different virus or bacteria, causing his illness, Andersen said, although that was a reasonable hypothesis.

This consideration seemed to weigh on Chinese scientists studying early patient samples. A researcher at a Chinese commercial laboratory who worked with Ren wrote in a blog in late January 2020 that although she had identified a new virus in hospital samples, this alone did not demonstrate that the virus was causing cases of pneumonia, slowing a official announcement.

In early 2020, the Chinese government also issued guidelines discouraging certain lines of scientific research and restricted the release of data about the virus.

Even after the virus’s genetic code was sent to the US repository, it would be difficult for US employees working on the research-oriented database to notice. The repository contains hundreds of millions of genetic sequences. Much of the screening process is automated.

And at least until Chinese officials started sounding the alarm in late December 2019, almost no one would know to look for a new coronavirus among the piles of shipments.

“At the time, there was no way anyone at NCBI realized how important this was,” said Alexander Crits-Christoph, a computational biologist, referring to the NIH center that manages GenBank.

Furthermore, according to him, genetic repositories like GenBank need to be careful when publicly releasing sequences, given that researchers often use the same data to prepare scientific articles.

Still, some scientists believe that U.S. and global health officials have been slow to adapt databases like GenBank to allow them to take advantage of sequences that could have critical implications for public health.

Such a database could, for example, automatically scan for new viruses whose genetic codes overlap with those known to be dangerous, Kamil said. And it could ensure that these sequences are released more widely, even as health officials await missing details or reviews.

“Give these sequences special care, my God,” he said. “Why haven’t the agencies responsible for public health or global health stepped up their efforts and said, ‘It’s 2024, we need to be safer so things like this don’t happen again?'”