CAUGHT: NIH Deleted COVID Sequencing from Database, New FOIA Documents Reveal

Remember when COVID-19 was first discovered?

Dr. Fauci and others in the government kept trying to tell us that this was a natural disease.

They insisted time and time again that this was not a man-made virus or the result of a “lab leak.”

Instead, they assured us that this was a natural virus from Wuhan, China.

Well, newly revealed emails and documents prove that COVID data, including the genetic sequencing, was DELETED off of their databases.

They have now been caught, thanks to a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request that requires the requested documents to be made public.

In other words, the NIH deleted the original sequencing of COVID-19 from their database.

So Empower Oversight, a non-partisan government watchdog, filed a FOIA request.

What came back is stunning.

Newly released emails are included.

You have to read and see it to believe it.

But first, we want to refresh your memory: remember when Dr. Fauci claimed that COVID-19 originated naturally?

Watch below:

Sen. Roger Marshall:
"Will you commit today to release all records, fully unredacted, by the end of this week, so Congress and the American people can know the truth about NIH's role in the origins of COVID-19?"

Fauci: * proceeds to throw a fit * pic.twitter.com/AfjzEEFRfg

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) January 12, 2022

Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Fauci worked together to suppress information on the origins of COVID-19. It's blatant dishonesty, and it was an abuse of Fauci's position. pic.twitter.com/uhcMFtcnUx

— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) June 7, 2021

Today on Just The News AM with Sophie Mann: Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton discusses how his organization has uncovered HHS documents that lead him to believe Dr. Anthony Fauci was involved in covering up the origins of the COVID-19 virus. pic.twitter.com/mOCircNPl1

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) June 8, 2021

Well, now we know the truth.

Troves of data, specifically the genetic sequencing of COVID-19 were deleted from their databases.

Why?

If there’s nothing to hide, then what’s wrong with being transparent and open to the public?

Uncover DC has more details on what’s going on:

An eye-opening 238 pages of just-released documents from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) disclose that in June 2020—at the request of researchers at China’s Wuhan University—the NIH deleted information about COVID-19 genetic sequencing. The tranche of emails, obtained by the non-partisan group Empower Oversight following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, reveal the frenzy of activity at the NIH following the deletions and show that an expert advised then NIH Director Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci that the coronavirus driving the global pandemic originated outside of the Wuhan food market as asserted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Requested last summer, the documents obtained by Empower Oversight highlight the circumstances surrounding the significant deletions by the NIH and are in stark contrast to the agency’s “best practices of scientific openness and collaboration.”

Introduction to the Deleted NIH Coronavirus Sequences
The deletions from the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive (SRA) were first underscored in a June 22, 2021, published preprint by Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Bloom had discovered that public access to the sequence had been removed. He contacted the NIH in June 2021 to discuss his findings, explaining in an email that the gene sequences may help understand how the pandemic began. As the NIH remained silent, Bloom’s subsequent preprint that same month prompted several media reports and letters from U.S. Senators. The first paragraph of Bloom’s research paper, titled “Recovery of deleted deep sequencing data shed more light on the early Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 epidemic,” states:

“The origin and early spread of SARS-CoV-2 remains shrouded in mystery. Here I identify a data set containing SARS-CoV-2 sequences from early in the Wuhan epidemic that has been deleted from the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive. I recover the deleted files from the Google Cloud, and reconstruct partial sequences of 13 early epidemic viruses. Phylogenetic analysis of these sequences in the context of carefully annotated existing data suggests that the Huanan Seafood Market sequences that are the focus of the joint WHO-China report are not fully representative of the viruses in Wuhan early in the epidemic. Instead, the progenitor of known SARS-CoV-2 sequences likely contained three mutations relative to the market viruses that made it more similar to SARS-CoV-2’s bat coronavirus relatives.”

On July 14, 2021, following Bloom’s article, Empower Oversight filed a FOIA request with the NIH, seeking transparency about controversial deletions from the SRA “within the next 20 days.” With open, global cooperation as the intended goal, the agency operates the database as part of its participation in the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) to “capture, organize, preserve and present nucleotide sequence data as part of the open scientific record.” Echoing this objective, a statement released by INSDC on SARS-CoV-2 sequence data sharing during the pandemic reinforced the need for mutual effort and transparency. The group asserted, “The global COVID-19 crisis has brought an urgent need for the rapid open sharing of data related to the outbreak.”

Undoubtedly, the global pandemic set the stage for the mandatory requirement of transparency. Frustrated, after four months and no response from the NIH to its FOIA request, on Nov. 17, 2021, Empower Oversight filed a lawsuit (with an amended complaint) against the agency to force its compliance with the FOIA and obtain the requested documents. Commenting on the 238-page batch of emails finally received, Empower Oversight notes that NIH’s FOIA staff has made significant errors when searching for relevant records and reviewing records for FOIA exemptions, resulting in erroneously redacted content. Nonetheless, the documents shared by the NIH thus far contain crucial new information.

Folks, the government is supposed to avoid conflicts of interest or even avoid the perception of a conflict of interest.

The same is generally supposed to be true when it comes to cover-ups.

So why was the NIH caught red-handed deleting genetic sequencing in regards to COVID-19?

Shouldn’t they have wanted the sequence to be public?

After all, if this truly was a natural disease, wouldn’t you want as many scientists as possible to look at it to come up with a cure?

In a new study, I identify and recover a deleted set of #SARSCoV2 sequences that provide additional information about viruses from the early Wuhan outbreak: https://t.co/1zdeiOQ0vo (1/n)

— Bloom Lab (@jbloom_lab) June 22, 2021

National Institutes of Health deleted COVID info at Wuhan researcher's request, emails show https://t.co/zYlvNVH61X
NIH directed reporters away from NY Times article to more "even-keeled" WaPo piece. pic.twitter.com/Rt7Acwepf7

— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) March 29, 2022

More #FOIA requests reveal 239 more documents showing #NIH deleted sequences for #WIV. https://t.co/2K9ybPEvHL

— Dr. Lynn Fynn (Fan Account)🐭 (@fynn_fan) March 29, 2022

Right now, we have what appears to be hard evidence that there was a major cover-up.

So where is the media?

Where is the Democrat party?

Think about it: when it came to President Trump, all we had were anonymous sources without any proof.

Yet, despite the lack of proof and the fact that accusations against Trump only came from anonymous sources, the left engaged in endless witch hunts and impeachment attempts.

But now, we have actual evidence that a cover up may have taken place.

And all we hear is silence from the left.

Their silence is defeaning.

The Epoch Times confirms these stunning new emails:

National Institutes of Health (NIH) documents obtained by a nonprofit watchdog in a federal court suit reveal that the agency deleted CCP virus genetic sequencing information from the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the Chinese lab’s request.

The Arlington, Virginia-based Empower Oversight Whistleblowers and Researchers (EO) obtained, as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and lawsuit, more than 230 pages of documents dating from 2020 that include emails, memoranda, and other correspondence among and between the lab and multiple NIH officials.

The CCP virus, also known as the novel coronavirus, was first detected in China in late 2019, before it spread worldwide. Since the first death from the virus in the United States was reported in January 2020, an estimated 1 million Americans and 6 million globally have reportedly succumbed to the virus.

Controversy has raged in the United States over whether the virus originated in an animal-to-human transfer in a Wuhan-area wet market, as Chinese officials have insisted, or if it escaped from the Wuhan lab where research was being done on such viruses, some of which was being supported with NIH funds through the New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.

Among the NIH officials prominently mentioned in the documents are then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who actively participated in the discussions and decision-making described in the materials obtained by EO.

“On June 5, 2020, a Wuhan University researcher requested that NIH retract the researcher’s submission of BioProject ID PRJNA637497 because of error. The Wuhan researcher explained ‘I’m sorry for my wrong submitting,’” EO said in a statement on March 29.

“BioProject ID PRJNA637497 is also referred to as Submission ID SUB7554642. Three days later, on June 8th, the NIH declined the researcher’s request, advising that it prefers to edit or replace, as opposed to delete, sequences submitted to the SRA,” EO reported.

But then, on June 16, 2020, NIH officials reversed themselves and deleted the genetic sequencing data, as requested by the Wuhan researcher.

That researcher was quoted by EO as explaining to NIH: “Recently, I found that it’s hard to visit my submitted SRA data, and it would also be very difficult for me to update the data. I have submitted an updated version of this SRA data to another website, so I want to withdraw the old one at NCBI in order to avoid the data version issue.”

After some discussion about what would be deleted, the NIH concluded the discussion by reassuring the Wuhan researcher that it “had withdrawn everything.”

The documents also indicate, according to EO, that after researcher Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, “alerted NIH about the deleted sequences, [Collins] and [Fauci] hosted a Sunday afternoon Zoom meeting. The invitation Collins sent out for the meeting asks invitees to read Bloom’s [June 22, 2021] preprint paper closely and provide their ‘advice on the interpretation and significance of’ it.”

According to EO, the documents show that “Professor Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center later sent the group an email stating that the deleted data seemed to support the idea that the pandemic began outside the Huanan market in Wuhan and that the matter must be analyzed properly.”

If the virus’s spread began outside of the market, it would undermine the official Chinese government claim, and thus reinforce claims of experts in the United States and elsewhere that the pandemic likely escaped from the Wuhan lab.

The EO report also claims that NIH communications staff members were using off-the-record emails to advise “reporters toward more favorable coverage concerning termination of public access to the sequences by The Washington Post, and away from coverage by The New York Times, whose ‘tone’ had been criticized in communications among NIH officials.”

In addition, EO said NIH claims to have retained copies of the deleted data “for preservation purposes,” although the federal agency has refused to conduct a transparent examination of it.

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An NIH spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email that the sequences in question were submitted in March 2020 by a researcher at a China-based institution for posting in SRA, which it said it managed by NIH’s National Center for Biotechnology (NCBI).

If it weren’t for whistleblowers and government watchdogs, we wouldn’t even know about these deleted sequences.

Well, what other questionable behavior has gone on – but hasn’t been caught?

If our government leaders have been unwilling to be transparent with this issue, what other issues are they trying to hide from the public?

Public awareness and interest is the only way we can hold our leadership accountable!

Please share this article with your family and friends so they know the truth about the original sequencing of COVID-19!