
The acting director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Lawrence Tabak, has admitted that his agency hid crucial genomic sequences of SARS-CoV-2 from public view, at the request of China.
According to the United States government, the NIH is “the primary Federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research.”
Tabak made the admission while being quizzed last week by a House Appropriations subcommittee, stating that the NIH had “eliminated from public view” data from Wuhan, China, where the COVID pandemic originated. The precise origins of this “novel coronavirus” remain shrouded in mystery almost two-and-a-half years later, due in most part to the Chinese regime, which has refused to cooperate with international investigations into the virus.
Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) asked Tabak to explain why American officials would comply with such a request, to which Tabak responded: “There’s no question that the communication that we had about the sequence archive ... could have been improved. I freely admit that.”
He then added, “The archive never deleted the sequence, it just did not make it available for interrogation.”
“So wait, you have the information still?” Beutler asked. “Researchers can apply to the NIH and get the information from you?”
“In the way that it was originally eliminated from public view, it was withdrawn, and that’s the most difficult for people to access,” Tabak replied.
He then described how the information had been stored – on an archaic tape drive, making it very difficult to locate, and said that it should have been “suppressed” rather than “withdrawn.”
In March of this year, a reporter for Vanity Fair broke the story of how a biologist named Jesse Bloom discovered that early SARS-CoV-2 sequences had “disappeared from a federally run data repository.”
Bloom approached then-NIH director Francis Collins as well as Dr. Antony Fauci with his discovery. On a conference call with Collins and Fauci as well as biologist Kristian Andersen, however, Bloom was told that the Chinese had the “right” to withdraw this information and that Bloom was being unethical in questioning this.