Hi, Thank you for the support! :) 1. The deletion of published data is thankfully not something that commonly happens, but it is not against the rules of the

Hi, Thank you for the support! :) 1. The deletion of published data is thankfully not something that commonly happens, but it is not against the rules of the NCBI database. Scientists who deposit their data into the database have the right to ask for that data to be taken down even if it has been published. That's why there is a concern that some scientists may have used this mechanism to delete original data with early Covid-19 sequences in it. Some scientists have called for NCBI to please allow them to search through deleted or suppressed data for these early Covid-19 sequences, but they have not been granted permission. Please see Vanity Fair's report on this: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no... 2. I have seen an archived version of that job posting but, like you said, it didn't surprise me that they were looking for more coronavirologists - the Wuhan Institute of Virology does have one of the world's largest (if not the largest) bat coronavirus hunting programs. The website being revamped kind of goes into speculative territory - maybe it was just time to upgrade the site or maybe they did it to avoid negative attention. The more disturbing thing to me is that they did not share their pathogen database (taken offline in Sep 2019) despite a pandemic happening. The database was meant to help inform pandemic response, but when a real pandemic happened, the database could not be found anywhere. None of their collaborators, including in the US, have seemed to be able to provide a copy.