Chinese researchers isolated and mapped the COVID-19 virus in late December 2019, at least two weeks before the Beijing regime announced it to the world, according to the Street Journal, which had access to US Congressional documents.

The discovery brings back to the center of the debate how much China knew about the origins of the pandemic, La Stampa and Rador Radio Romania cite.

Documents obtained from the US Department of Health by a congressional committee and reviewed exclusively by the Wall Street Journal show that a Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded the nearly complete sequence of the virus’ structure to a database run by the US government on December 28, 2019. .

China was still publicly describing the outbreak in Wuhan as viral pneumonia of “unknown cause”. At the time of the events, the wholesale market in Wuhan, where the virus was detected, was not even closed.

“The new information doesn’t shed light on the debate over whether COVID originated from an infected animal or a laboratory ‘leak,’ but it does suggest that the world still doesn’t have a full explanation for the pandemic’s origins,” notes the Wall Street Journal.

“The extra two weeks could prove crucial to help the international medical community determine how COVID-19 spread, develop medical defenses and launch a possible vaccine,” the experts said.

“At the end of 2019, scientists and governments around the world were in a race against time to understand the mysterious disease that would eventually be named COVID-19 and would kill millions and sicken many more,” the US paper added.

The new discovery “underscores how careful we have to be about the accuracy of the information provided by the Chinese government,” said Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle who reviewed the documents and the newly discovered genetic sequence.

The Chinese researcher who submitted the sequence of the virus, Lily Ren of the Beijing Institute of Pathogenic Biology, did not respond to a letter from the Wall Street Journal. The institute where he works is part of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.

The documents were obtained by Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee after the committee threatened to sue the Department of Health and Human Services.

The first known publication of the sequence of the virus, dubbed SARS-CoV-2, took place on January 11, 2020, after Chinese authorities shared the information with the World Health Organization (WHO).

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta said the sequence of the virus was transmitted to the Chinese equivalent on January 5, but it has not been shared with scientists around the world.

The sequence provided by Wren in December 2019 was never published and was removed from the database on January 16, 2020, after a Department of Health agency asked him for additional technical details but did not receive a response. Then, on January 12, the agency released the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 from another source.

“The sequence re-released on January 12, 2020, was almost identical to the one submitted to Lily Wren,” a Department of Health official told a congressional committee.

One theory suggests that the virus could have left the laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). However, many scientific studies show that the virus most likely has a natural origin and is transmitted to humans from an animal host. Other initial theories suggested that SARS-CoV-2 originated from wild animals sold at the Wuhan fish market.

But further research showed that the market may have been a point of spread, and not necessarily the source of the virus. Currently, the most accepted hypothesis by the scientific community is that the coronavirus was transmitted to humans from wild animals, with the bat as a possible original host.

Accusations of China’s lack of transparency in the early stages of the epidemic have been at the center of public debate, especially in the United States, where Congress has already launched an investigation, questioned witnesses and even attacked the CIA for not investigating earlier. Currently, the World Health Organization (WHO) and other bodies are conducting additional studies on this topic, as quoted by La Stampa and Rador Radio Romania.