Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci have requested the National Institutes of Health to delete information about the genetic sequencing of the virus that causes COVID-19.
The said report was according to the emails obtained by a group called Empower Oversight.
The said email was reported by the Just News report:
The National Institutes of Health deleted information about COVID-19 genetic sequencing during the pandemic at the request of researchers in Wuhan, China, a move that created consternation in science circles, according to emails obtained by a nonpartisan whistleblower and government oversight group.
The emails obtained by the Empower Oversight group show a Wuhan University researcher submitted virus sequence information to the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive in March 2020 – the same month the World Health Organization declared a pandemic and about two months after the virus was detected in Wuhan.
The scientist made an additional submission on the virus in June 2020, according to the emails. Later that day, he asked the NIH to retract the submission, claiming it was made in error.
The NIH responded by saying it preferred to edit or replace submissions over replacing them.
A few days later, the researcher submitted another request to withdraw the genetic sequence from the NIH database, according to the emails.
The NIH agreed to the researcher’s request one day later, and asked for clarification on whether another submission should be deleted.
“I had withdrawn everything,” an unnamed NIH official said to the Wuhan researcher in an email.
The emails were obtained after Empower Oversight sued the NIH under the Freedom of Information Act.
In an interview with BBC this week, Fauci was asked how he “could be so certain, so early on” that the pandemic had a natural origin when he “knew so little about the virus.”
He then responded, “Well, I was never certain so early on,” Fauci added. “I have always kept an open mind. But when you look at the circumstances of the evolution, the similarity between [SARS-CoV-2] and SARS-CoV-1 from 2002 and 2003, I said – as did many other virologists who are very experienced in that – that the most likely ideology was a jumping species from an animal to the human.
The BBC presenter also asked Fauci, “Was the scientific community too quick to dismiss the possibility that it could have come from a laboratory?”
“Well, I don’t think they were dismissing it,” Fauci said. “I think it’s been misinterpreted. Everyone has always kept an open mind.”
Watch it here, Fauci’s remark about the beginning of the pandemic: GOP War Room/Youtube
Sources: WND, Just The News