summary - A ~25-page open-source investigation identifying at least 15 separate WIV-managed virus/sequence databases that went offline between 2013 and 2019, most consequentially the institute’s main sample/sequence database (reportedly covering some 22,000 coronavirus samples and sequence records), taken offline on 12 September 2019 - roughly 3 months before the first officially reported COVID-19 cases. Documents that WIV told the WHO-convened international team, when asked during their Feb. 2021 visit, that the database was removed due to “hacking attempts”/cyberattack risk; the report finds this explanation inconsistent with the specific pattern and timing of removals across multiple, differently-configured databases. As of this report, none of the removed databases had been restored or their contents released.
relevance_note - The best-documented primary account of the Sept. 2019 WIV database takedown specifically (distinct from the separate, later, mid-2020 NCBI Sequence-Read-Archive deletion of early-Wuhan patient sequences that Bloom 2021 recovers - that is slice 1’s topic, not this one). Per this run’s absence-of-evidence caveat: the takedown and China’s non-cooperation with follow-up requests are suspicious circumstantially but are absence of evidence, not evidence of a specific mechanism - what’s actually documented is the date, scale, and non-recovery, not what the database would have shown.