US documents show that China hid COVID-19 details weeks before it became pandemic

Chinese researchers reportedly mapped the virus responsible for COVID-19 in late December 2019, a revelation that comes at least two weeks before the World Health Organization (WHO) minimized the threat posed by the virus that eventually escalated into a global pandemic. A probe conducted by US congressional investigators reveals that the Chinese researchers successfully isolated the virus on December 28, 2019.

Documents outlining this revised timeline were acquired by House Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, suggesting that China was aware of the pandemic in the crucial early days when the virus might have been confined to specific regions within China. Subsequently, during the New Year celebrations, the virus proliferated as people traveled across the country, leading to its global dissemination and emerging as one of the most profound health crises of the twenty-first century.

The additional two weeks of awareness could have played a pivotal role in aiding the global medical community in comprehending the threat posed by COVID-19. In the early stages of the disease’s spread, scientists worldwide were fervently working to understand the mysterious illness, eventually named COVID-19, which claimed millions of lives, infected tens of millions, and triggered significant disruptions in the global economy.

The congressional investigators’ report, as disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, outlines that a Chinese researcher in Beijing submitted an almost complete sequence of the virus’s structure to a US government-operated database on December 28, 2019. Notably, this sequence was never published and was deleted from the database on January 16, 2020, after the US National Institute of Health (NIH) sought additional technical details from the Chinese researcher, who failed to respond. On January 12, NIH received and published a SARS-CoV-2 sequence from an alternative source.

The report also states that China shared the sequence of the Covid virus with the World Health Organization on January 11, 2020, according to information provided by the US government.