Section “恶意诽谤21” (“Malicious Slander #21”) of this compiled PRC Embassy rebuttal document directly addresses Jesse Bloom’s 2021 report that Wuhan-University-generated early-outbreak sequencing reads had been deleted from the NCBI SRA database. States that Chinese authorities investigated and found the withdrawal originated with the Wuhan University research team itself: the journal (Small) had removed the manuscript’s data-availability paragraph during editing, the researchers judged the deposited reads no longer necessary given the paper no longer described them, and requested NIH withdraw the data on 16 June 2021 — not a coordinated cover-up. Echoes and formalizes in writing the same account given orally by Vice-Minister Zeng Yixin at the 22 July 2021 State Council Information Office press conference. duplicate_of: none — no other node in the pool cites this or the equivalent 22-Jul-2021 SCIO press-conference statement it restates.
relevance_note: the clearest available formal, citable PRC-government rebuttal to Bloom’s deleted-sequences claim; no equivalent has been located from a Chinese academic (as opposed to diplomatic/government) source — see orientation note for what else was searched and not found.