First SARS-CoV-2 Genome was Deposited in U.S. Database Earlier Than Previously Known - Science | Virus World | Scoop.it
From www.science.org - January 22, 12:03 PM

A U.S. House of Representatives panel yesterday released evidence that a Chinese research team submitted a SARS-CoV-2 genome to a U.S. database on 28 December 2019, nearly 2 weeks before a sequence from another group became public and kick-started the race to develop vaccines and drugs for COVID-19. The revelation, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, renewed allegations that Chinese officials tried to cover up early sequences of the new coronavirus. Lawmakers said the new information also raises the question of whether the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) GenBank database should somehow flag submissions of pathogen sequences with urgent public health importance. The agency had marked the researcher’s submission as incomplete and deleted the sequence before it became public. The never-completed GenBank submission was “a huge missed opportunity” to start developing drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines earlier, agrees virologist Jeremy Kamil of Louisiana State University Health Shreveport.