Chinese Lab Mapped Deadly Coronavirus Two Weeks Before Beijing Told the World, Documents Show

Former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the Institute of Pathogen Biology of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing in 2020. (File Photo: Reuters)
Former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the Institute of Pathogen Biology of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing in 2020. (File Photo: Reuters)

Summary

The lead time could have been crucial to combating the pandemic, analysts say.

WASHINGTON—Chinese researchers isolated and mapped the virus that causes Covid-19 in late December 2019, at least two weeks before Beijing revealed details of the deadly virus to the world, congressional investigators said, raising questions anew about what China knew in the pandemic’s crucial early days.

Documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by a House committee and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show that a Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded a nearly complete sequence of the virus’s structure to a U.S. government-run database on Dec. 28, 2019. Chinese officials at that time were still publicly describing the disease outbreak in Wuhan, China, as a viral pneumonia “of unknown cause" and had yet to close the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, site of one of the initial Covid-19 outbreaks.

China only shared the virus’s sequence with the World Health Organization on Jan. 11, 2020, according to U.S. government timelines of the pandemic.

The new information doesn’t shed light on the debate over whether Covid emerged from an infected animal or a lab leak, but it suggests that the world still doesn’t have a full accounting of the pandemic’s origin.

The extra two weeks could have proven crucial in helping the international medical community pinpoint how Covid-19 spread, develop medical defenses, and get started on an eventual vaccine, specialists have said. In late 2019, scientists and governments worldwide were racing to understand the mystery disease eventually named Covid-19 that would kill millions and sicken many more.

It “underscores how cautious we have to be about the accuracy of the information that the Chinese government has released," said Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle who has reviewed the documents and the recently discovered gene sequence. “It’s important to keep in mind how little we know."

The Chinese researcher who submitted the virus sequence, Dr. Lili Ren of the Beijing-based Institute of Pathogen Biology, didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. The institute is part of the state-affiliated Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.

“China has kept refining our COVID response based on science to make it more targeted," a Chinese Embassy spokesperson said. “China’s COVID response policies are science-based, effective, and consistent with China’s national realities. They can stand the test of history."

The documents describing a new timeline were obtained by Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee after the committee threatened to subpoena the Department of Health and Human Services.

Melanie Egorin, HHS Assistant Secretary for Legislation, wrote last month to the committee’s chair, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R., Wash.), that Ren submitted the virus sequence on Dec. 28, 2019, to a genetic database, GenBank, run by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

The first known publication of the sequence of the Covid virus, called SARS-CoV-2, came on Jan. 11, 2020, after Chinese authorities shared the information with the World Health Organization. In addition, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta says the virus sequence was shared with China’s equivalent of the CDC on Jan. 5 but not made known to scientists globally.

The sequence that Ren provided in December 2019 was never published, and was deleted from the database on Jan. 16, 2020, after NIH asked her for more technical details and she didn’t respond, Egorin wrote. Then, on Jan. 12, NIH received and published a SARS-CoV-2 sequence from another source.

“The sequence published on January 12, 2020, was nearly identical to the sequence that was submitted by Lili Ren," Egorin told the committee.

The discovery that a researcher in the state-affiliated Chinese lab had isolated and mapped the virus well before Beijing revealed publicly that it had done so shows the U.S. “cannot trust any of the so-called ‘facts’ or data provided by the CCP and calls into serious question the legitimacy of any scientific theories based on such information," McMorris Rodgers said in a statement. The committee has spent months probing Covid’s origins, U.S. government funding of overseas research and other issues.

Ren is listed in contract documents as being a collaborator on a U.S.-funded project to study how coronaviruses can be transferred from animals to humans. The work, which included collecting bat samples in China, was overseen by the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.

The Journal has previously reported that Chinese specialists met with the World Health Organization in Beijing on Jan. 3, 2020, but didn’t disclose that the new disease was caused by a coronavirus, a fact Chinese officials already knew.

“This [database] submission shows that in fact, at least by Dec. 28, 2019, scientists within China did know this pneumonia was being caused" by a new coronavirus, said Bloom, the virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle.

Michael R. Gordon contributed to this article.

Write to Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com

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