On Sept. 12, 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s database of viral sequences was suddenly taken offline in the middle of the night.
The deleted database included a huge collection of bat virus sequences. The database has never been publicly recovered.
The database, which contained 22,000 unpublished samples and sequences of bat and rodent viruses, could be crucial to determining the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
To date, there have been no known requests from public health officials to reinstate or examine the database.
