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A Chinese researcher with ties to China’s government and military — and to Dr. Anthony Fauci — mapped the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 and submitted it to a U.S. government database in December 2019, two weeks before the virus’ sequence was officially revealed.
The delay may have worsened the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, some experts said.
The revelations arise from documents the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) provided to the U.S. House of Representatives Energy & Commerce Committee last month as part of an ongoing investigation into the origins of COVID-19. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) first reported the story on Jan. 17.
The researcher, Dr. Lili Ren, is affiliated with the Institute of Pathogen Biology in Beijing which, according to a statement by the committee, has ties to the Chinese Community Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army of China.
According to the WSJ, the institute is part of the state-affiliated Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.
The documents show that Ren was on the payroll of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the agency overseeing the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), directed at the time by Fauci.
“The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has confirmed that Dr. Ren’s December 28, 2019 sequence was nearly identical to the sequence later made public by the China CDC on January 10, 2020, which at the time was the first known sequence,” the committee said in its statement.
The documents raise “questions anew about what China knew in the pandemic’s crucial early days,” the WSJ said.
But according to investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, writing for The Disinformation Chronicle, “The disclosures call into further question what officials at the [NIH] knew about research they were funding in China where the pandemic began.”
Ren was on the payroll of the NIH in December 2019, according to a grant awarded to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit operated by Peter Daszak, Thacker reported. The NIH awarded the grant in 2014 for a multi-year project, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
“The grant shows that taxpayers paid Ren a salary, although NIH redacted the amounts for salary and benefits,” Thacker wrote, referencing the documents obtained as part of the committee’s investigation.
HHS released the documents after the committee threatened to subpoena the agency, the New York Post reported.
According to a Dec. 21, 2023, letter by HHS to the committee, Ren submitted the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 to GenBank, a database operated by the NIH, on Dec. 28, 2019. However, the sequence, which according to the WSJ was the nearly complete sequence of COVID-19, was not published and was subsequently deleted from the database.
“Dr. Ren’s submission was missing some of the technical (not scientific) information required for publication on GenBank,” the committee stated. “She was notified by NIH staff on December 31, 2019, that her submission would be deleted without the additional information.”
The Post reported that Ren’s submission “was nearly identical to what Beijing eventually presented to the World Health Organization on January 11, 2020.” According to HHS, “The sequence published on January 12, 2020, was nearly identical to the sequence that was submitted by Lili Ren” on Dec. 28, 2019.
The committee noted that “Dr. Ren’s sequence is not the first instance of Chinese researchers attempting to delete early SARS-CoV-2 sequences posted to GenBank, but it is the earliest known one,” adding that “China has consistently stated that it published the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 as soon as it was available.”
“Chinese officials at that time were still publicly describing the disease outbreak in Wuhan, China, as a viral pneumonia ‘of unknown cause’ and had yet to close the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, site of one of the initial COVID-19 outbreaks,” the WSJ reported.
‘Unethical, unconscionable, and unforgivable’
According to the WSJ, “The extra two weeks could have proved crucial in helping the international medical community pinpoint how COVID-19 spread, develop medical defenses and get started on an eventual vaccine.”
Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., a frequent critic of gain-of-function research that many scientists and experts believe led to the development of SARS-CoV-2 in a laboratory from which it may have subsequently leaked, told The Defender:
“In assessing the impact of the 15-day delay between determination and disclosure of the sequence of the outbreak virus, a crucial point is that, in January 2020, the epidemic doubling time of the outbreak was 2.5 days.
“This means, mathematically, that the outbreak increased in size and in difficulty to control, by a factor of 64 as a result of the 15-day delay. A small and probably controllable outbreak expanded by a factor of 64, becoming a massive and effectively uncontrollable outbreak, as a direct result of the ethically challenged scientists’ delay in disclosing results.
“This was unethical, unconscionable and unforgivable.”
In its statement, the committee said, “This significant discovery further underscores why we cannot trust any of the so-called ‘facts’ or data provided by the CCP and calls into serious question the legitimacy of any scientific theories based on such information.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told the Post the revelations are “the latest example of HHS’s attempts to prevent the public from fully understanding where COVID-19 originated.”
Ebright told the Post, “It is of course misfeasance — actionable misfeasance — that the NIH has withheld this information from Congress for months.” Former NIAID Director Francis Collins and former Acting NIH Director Lawrence Tabak “need to be held accountable for their misfeasance, with, at minimum, forfeiture of federal positions and federal pensions.”
Ren did not respond to emails from the WSJ and the Post seeking comment.
‘Coverup’ by U.S., Chinese governments
Ren was a co-investigator with and sub-grantee of EcoHealth Alliance in the multi-year “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” grant funded by the NIH.
According to the Post, the EcoHealth Alliance “helped fund coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology” and “directed funds from grants it received from [NIAID] to the Wuhan lab,” citing a report from the Government Accountability Office.
A Nov. 1, 2018, letter from Ren to Daszak, revealed by Thacker on The Disinformation Chronicle, praised the collaboration of China’s Institute of Pathogen Biology, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and the Peking Union Medical College with EcoHealth Alliance on research “to identify and prevent the transmission of bat coronaviruses to human populations globally.”
“In particular, the NIAID funded R01 proposal entitled ‘Understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence’ will provide an excellent opportunity to achieve these goals,” Ren’s letter stated. “Understanding and preventing exposure and transmission of zoonotic diseases from wildlife to humans remains a high priority.”
Speaking to Nature magazine in August 2020, Daszak said the grant “doesn’t work on” SARS-CoV-2. “Our organization has not actually published any data on SARS-CoV-2. We work on bat coronaviruses that are out there in the wild and trying to predict what the next one is. We don’t work on sequencing SARS-CoV-2.”
Thacker reported that NIH officials did not respond to multiple requests for information regarding the salary Ren received, adding that the “Fauci’s NIH grant also paid for Ren’s expenses, including travel to the United States to meet with Daszak as well as her collaborator Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina.”
According to Thacker, Baric helped ghostwrite a commentary titled, “No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of SARS-CoV-2” that appeared in the journal Emerging Microbes & Infections.
Thacker identified this as one of three key scientific papers that were used to dismiss the “lab-leak theory” of COVID-19’s origins as a “conspiracy theory.”
In a Feb. 12, 2020, email from Baric to the authors of the Emerging Microbes & Infections paper, Baric said he did not want to be “cited in as having commented prior to submission,” adding his thoughts that “the community needs to write these editorials.”
According to Thacker, Baric wrote this even though he submitted “several alterations to the text in track changes,” noting that “Baric’s name does not appear as an author on the published commentary.”
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, bioweapons expert and author of the book “Resisting Medical Tyranny: Why the COVID-19 Mandates are Criminal,” told The Defender the latest revelations provide further proof that the U.S. government was aware of the gain-of-function research occurring in China and of a lab leak in Wuhan.
“Ιt was clear that agencies of the U.S. government knew there was a lab leak at the Wuhan BSL4 [biosafety level 4 lab] in September 2019. Even former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield admitted that,” he said.
“Everything after that was a coverup and disinformation by agencies of the United States government and the People’s Republic of China,” Boyle said.
Boyle said that if both governments had acted immediately and effectively to contain the Wuhan lab leak in September of 2019, perhaps the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic “that has now killed about 20 million people” could have been contained.
“We must pursue criminal accountability for everyone involved here,” Boyle added.
The committee also called for accountability but fell short of saying it would seek criminal referrals:
“The American people deserve to know the truth about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, and our investigation has uncovered numerous causes for concern, including how taxpayers’ dollars are spent, how our government’s public health agencies operate, and the need for more oversight into research grants to foreign scientists.
“In addition to equipping us to better prepare for the next pandemic, this investigation’s findings will help us as policymakers as we work to strengthen America’s biosafety practices and bolster oversight of research grants.”
During a closed-door interview with the House earlier this month, Fauci admitted that he was unaware whether NIAID conducted any oversight of the foreign laboratories it funded.
Speaking to the Post, Johnson also alleged a U.S. government coverup.
“In September 2023, I revealed that NIAID official Dr. Ping Chen reported on safety concerns at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November 2017,” he said. “HHS continues to refuse to provide me with a fully unredacted version of Dr. Chen’s report and make her available for an interview.”
“The American people deserve the complete truth about the origins [of] COVID-19,” Johnson added.
In September 2023, HHS barred the Wuhan Institute of Virology from receiving U.S. funding for the next 10 years, on the basis of evidence that a leak at the lab was responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.
