Fort Detrick, Maryland, actual source of the 'Wuhan' Flu?
Comment: As we'll see below in this report, the contention that it was Chinese scientists who did this - working, presumably, at the behest of the Chinese government - is ludicrous.
Dozens of test samples from patients in epicentre Wuhan were found to have been wiped from an international database used to track the virus' evolution.
The files could have provided vital clues about how the virus originated and how long it had been spreading before the seafood market outbreak in December 2019.
The American professor who spotted their deletion and managed to recover some of the data said they suggested Covid was circulating long before China's official timeline.
Comment: Long before THE official timeline. China is not particularly attached to it commencing in December 2019.
He found the early samples of the virus were more evolved than would be expected of a pathogen that had recently jumped from animals to humans — but did not say it gave more weight to the 'lab leak' theory.
Professor Jesse Bloom, a virologist from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, said he believed China had removed the files to 'obscure their existence'.
British scientists told MailOnline the findings confirm Covid was spreading in people before being linked to wet markets, 'perhaps months before'.
The latest cover-up comes amid mounting suspicion the virus may have accidentally leaked from a high-level biosecurity laboratory in Wuhan.
Boris Johnson's former chief aide Dominic Cummings said Professor Bloom's find pointed further 'towards' the 'lab leak' theory.
Giving evidence to a House of Lords select committee today, the UK's chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said there was a 'real need to make sure that we understand what's going on' in high-grade virology labs.
The cover-up was detailed in a scientific paper titled 'Recovery of deleted deep sequencing data sheds more light on the early Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 epidemic' today.
Forty-five positive samples had originally been uploaded to the National Institute of Health's (NIH) Sequence Read Archive by the Wuhan University in early March 2020.
The NIH is a US Government agency responsible for biomedical and public health research.
Comment: A US government agency. If the Chinese government hacked the NIH to 'fix the Covid timeline', you can be sure there would have been an international scandal. Instead, there's this meek report 'suggesting' that 'it is believed' that 'China did it'.
The samples were published as part of a study into diagnosing Covid patients using PCR tests - just days before the Chinese Government issued an order requiring approval of the publication of all coronavirus data.
Professor Bloom noted all 45 samples have since been pulled from the database, with 'no plausible scientific reason for the deletion'.
He said the most likely explanation was to 'abuse' and 'obscure' the truth about the origins of the pandemic.
Comment: Indeed, the AMERICAN origins of the 'pandemic' - an experimental vaccine virus 'gone wrong'.
Read the rest here
Comment: This study further cements the fact the virus was circulating the globe before the Chinese were caught unawares by it in Wuhan in December 2019.