After Uncovering Earliest-Known SARS-CoV-2 Sequence, E&C Republicans Press NIH for Possible Additional GenBank COVID Submissions

Letter

Dr. Bertagnolli,

Pursuant to Rules X and XI of the U.S. House of Representatives, we write to request information and documents from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that follow up on the December 21, 2023, response to our May 1, 2023, letter, and subsequent requests.

We were dismayed to learn that the NIH had received eight pages of genetic code and a nearly complete version of the genetic sequence for SARS-CoV-2, almost two weeks before the sequence was made public. However, the NIH apparently had no situational awareness in early January 2020 about this genetic code while high-level officials in our government were attempting to get the sequence, including directly from the Chinese government.

The circumstances suggest the possibility that there may be other early versions of the SARS CoV-2 sequence that were submitted to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI’s) Genbank but were not posted. Since such potential submissions could provide clues about the timing of the pandemic and how SARS CoV-2 was evolving at the beginning of the pandemic, there is a strong public interest to conduct further due diligence to check GenBank for such submissions.

Given this oversight interest, please provide the following by April 10, 2024:

All submissions of SARS-CoV-2 to GenBank prior to January 10, 2020, that have an accession number but were not posted to GenBank.

Thank you for your attention to this request.

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