> In Bloom’s view, their disappearance raised the possibility that the Chinese government might be trying to hide evidence about the pandemic’s early spread. Piecing together clues, Bloom established that the NIH itself had deleted the sequences from its own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan.
Bloom's view on these sequences turned out to be wrong.
The sequences were accurately described in a peer-reviewed paper that the Chinese scientists in question published (well before Bloom's preprint). The raw sequence reads, which were deleted from the NIH database, added nothing. The important information (the mutations in the sequences) were already listed in the paper.
From the point of view of the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the sequences themselves were not interesting. They were from fairly late in the Wuhan outbreak, and they were only very short segments of the viral genome. The Chinese paper in question was actually a technical paper testing a new sequencing technology. The message of the paper was, "We have this new sequencing machine, and we're going to show it off using some random CoVID patient samples," not, "We've identified particularly important patient samples that will shed light on the outbreak in Wuhan."
What Andersen and Fauci objected to was Bloom's accusation that the Chinese scientists who wrote the paper were engaging in deliberate deception and were part of a cover-up. Bloom had no evidence of that, and there's nothing to indicate that the Chinese scientists' explanation is incorrect: that they meant to upload the data to a Chinese database but didn't get around to it. After all, the raw data itself wasn't that interesting, and was already accurately summarized in their paper.
In my opinion, Bloom owes his Chinese colleagues an apology. Accusing people of covering up a pandemic with no evidence is a pretty low thing to do.
Not wow. This is routine. The NIH has a policy to let researchers delete data from the sequence archive for various reasons. The reason they deleted it is very suspect, but the actual act is unremarkable and doesn’t implicate the NIH.
This is another reason I'm so skeptical of the lab leak theory. People with no knowledge of epidemiology are willing to portray routine actions as horrific ethical violations, and it's difficult to tell when they are.
Yes, I have some training in adjacent areas and have found the political argument very frustrating. The molecular evidence is very compelling for natural evolution. The idea of a naturally discovered virus leaking from a lab is plausible, but the accusations of it being lab created are absurd.
The uploading process is done using code. It is super easy to screw it up especially if you are a trained biologist who learnt some python and bash from some random websites that stole their content from stackoverflow. So the process is there for that. Also likely for retractions where people have uploaded spurious data.
Wow.