Free Republic

The National Institutes of Health said it was reviewing the removal of genetic data about the Covid-19 virus from an agency-run archive after a scientist raised concerns about the episode earlier this summer. The data—a series of gene sequences from coronavirus samples obtained from Covid-19 patients in Wuhan in January and February 2020—could hold clues about the origin of the pandemic. The sequences were deleted from the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) last year at the request of one of the Wuhan University researchers who had originally provided them—a move that three Republican U.S. senators questioned in June in a sternly...

Finding the origin story for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for nearly 3.9 million deaths worldwide, has been largely hampered by lack of access to information from China where cases first popped up. Now, a researcher in Seattle has dug up deleted files from Google Cloud that reveal 13 partial genetic sequences for some of the earliest cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan, Carl Zimmer reported for The New York Times. The sequences don't tip the scales toward or away from one of the many theories about how SARS-CoV-2 came to be — they do not suggest the virus leaked from a...

Within minutes, six-year-old Rubjit Thindal went from happily chatting in the back seat of the car to collapsing and dying in her father's arms. "If we had known it was so serious, we would have called 911,'' Kuldip Thindal, Rubjit's distraught mother, said in Punjabi yesterday. "She just had a stomach ache -- she wasn't even crying.'' Rubjit was pronounced dead at hospital barely 24 hours after showing signs of a fever. Later, doctors told her parents she had the H1N1 influenza virus. She is believed to be the youngest person in Canada with the virus to have died.