Has China said enough about the coronavirus genome?
- Some scientists have raised concerns about the rate at which Chinese authorities are releasing information
- But international researchers say the virus might not be changing that much and attention should be focused on getting data from all places with outbreaks
Understanding the virus’s genetic sequence is essential for developing accurate diagnostics and vaccines as well as determining how the virus is changing.
But in recent weeks, questions have been raised in various quarters about how well and how quickly China is sharing this information with the wider world.
The questions surfaced in public earlier this month with two prominent scientists affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wu Chung-I and Pu Muming, leading a call for China’s researchers to publish genetic data as soon as possible.
In a letter to China’s National Science Review journal, Wu and Pu questioned why there was what they described as a gap in the data, with only older sequences available to researchers as of February 10.