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“This additional data will play a huge role in this effort,” said Dr. Woroobi.
It is not clear why this valuable information was lost in the first place. Scientists can request deletion of files by sending an email to archive managers to read the sequence. The National Library of Medicine, which manages the archive, said 13 sequences were removed last summer.
“These SARS-CoV-2 sequences were submitted for publication in the SRA in March 2020 and the submitted investigator subsequently requested that they be withdrawn in June 2020,” said Renate Miles, a spokeswoman for the National Institutes of Health.
She said the investigator, who did not give her name, told archive managers that the sequences had been updated and would be added to a different database. But Dr. Bloom has searched every database he knows, and hasn’t found it yet. “Obviously I can’t rule out that the sequences are in a database or some other webpage somewhere, but I couldn’t find them in any of the obvious places I looked,” he said.
Three of the co-authors of the 2020 test study that produced the 13 sequences did not immediately respond to emails inquiring about Dr. Bloom’s discovery. This study did not provide contact information for another co-author, Dr. Fu, who is also named in the spreadsheet from the other study.
Some scientists suspect that there is anything sinister behind the removal of the sequences. “I don’t really understand how this indicates a cover-up,” said Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah.
Dr. Goldstein noted that the test paper listed the individual mutations that the Wuhan researchers found in their tests. Although the complete sequences are no longer in the archive, basic information has been publicly available for more than a year, he said. It’s tucked away in a format that is hard for researchers to find.
“We all missed this relatively obscure paper,” Dr. Goldstein said.
“You really can’t say why it was removed,” Dr. Bloom admitted in an interview. “You could say that the practical consequence of removing it is that people didn’t even notice it was there.” He also indicated that the Chinese government had ordered the destruction of a number of early samples of the virus and prevented the publication of papers on the Corona virus without its consent.
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