A woman wears a face masks as she walks past a sign for free COVID-19 testing, in the New York City borough of Queens, NY, April 28, 2022. Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden's chief medical adviser and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, stated on April 27, that the United States is in a “transition phase” of the Coronavirus pandemic. (Photo by Anthony Behar/Sipa USA)
NY: Dr. Fauci Announces U.S. In Transition Phase Of Pandemic
WASHINGTON (77WABC) — National Institutes of Health acting director Lawrence Tabak told lawmakers that health officials concealed early genomic sequences of COVID-19 at the request of Chinese scientists — but insisted the data remains on file.
Tabak told a House Appropriations subcommittee that the NIH “eliminated from public view” the data from the pandemic epicenter in Wuhan, China. However he also said researchers can still access it through a “tape drive.”
“There’s no question that the communication that we had about the sequence archive — Sequence Read Archive — could have been improved. I freely admit that,” Tabek said. “If I may, the archive never deleted the sequence, it just did not make it available for interrogation.”
Vanity Fair recently reported similar findings, despite potentially resolving whether the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or passed naturally from animals to humans.
