There certainly was deliberate deletion of raw patient sequence data from the NCBI database. See the paper by Jesse D. Bloom that the NYT article references[1].

There certainly was deliberate deletion of raw patient sequence data from the NCBI database. See the paper by Jesse D. Bloom that the NYT article references[1]. I would classify this as "manipulation". The author is also puzzled why this was done if the data matches the published summary in the Wang et al. 2020b paper, but hasn't received any replies from the authors. This is also interesting: > Particularly in light of the directive that labs destroy early samples (Pingui 2020) and multiple orders requiring approval of publications on COVID-19 (China CDC 2020; Kang et al. 2020a), this suggests a less than wholehearted effort to maximize information about viral sequences from early in the Wuhan epidemic. > I don't even think there's any connection to the WIV here: the corresponding authors don't appear to be affiliated with the institute. The authors of the nanopore paper are associated with Wuhan University. Since the CCP controls all aspects of Chinese research it's safe to say that a connection with the WIV certainly exists and they would be in a position to control the output of both. Again, the reason behind this will likely never be known to the outside world. But to take anything coming from Chinese researchers as evidence for a narrative that exculpates China from any fault would be extremely naive. Or do we really believe there's nothing suspicious about a country of 1.4bn people having 5,508 reported deaths from COVID-19[2]? [1]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.18.449051v2.full https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.18.449051v2.... [2]: https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn