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COVID-origins report sparks debate over major genome hub GISAID

GISAID revoked researchers’ access following the report, sparking discussion about findings based on data found in online repositories.
  1. Smriti Mallapaty
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On 20 March, an international team of researchers posted a headline-grabbing online report1 describing genomic data found in swabs taken from the market in Wuhan, China, that has been linked to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data were gathered by a separate team in China and hosted on a major online database, the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID). Hours later, GISAID temporarily revoked the authors’ access.

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Nature 616, 13-14 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00901-9

Updates & Corrections

  • Update 31 March 2023: GISAID has now removed the additional restrictions that it had introduced for access to the China CDC data; the story has been changed to reflect that.

  • Correction 31 March 2023: An earlier version of this story said that GISAID had clarified its rules for access to the China CDC data after the Zenodo report was posted; in fact it added more restrictions.

References

  1. Crits-Christoph, A. et al. Report at Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7754299 (2023).

  2. Gao, G. et al. Preprint at Research Square https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1370392/v1 (2022).

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