NIH asks court to mask official who deleted Chinese COVID data, 19 months after outing him

Republican senators blasted the National Institutes of Health for asking a court to retroactively seal the names of a Chinese researcher and an agency staffer involved in the deletion of data from its genetic sequencing library, calling the effort an ongoing "cover-up" that "further underscores the agency's shady efforts to conceal pertinent data" on the origins of COVID-19.

NIH disclosed the pair's names and actions 19 months ago to fulfill a public records request, also identifying multiple staffers who manage its Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and Chinese researchers who submitted sequences early in the pandemic. 

But the two names associated with the March 2020 SRA deletion came up again, unredacted, in different records the agency turned over this year in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, prompting NIH to tell the court it goofed and wanted their names redacted.
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