ALEXANDRIA, Va. (Legal Newsline) - A whistleblower group, Empower Oversight, has filed a complaint in federal court over the National Institutes of Health (NIH) non-compliance with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests centering on genetic information vital to understanding the origins of COVID-19.
The sought-after documents are related to a request by Chinese researchers that NIH delete genetic sequences of the SARS-CoV-2 virus from an agency database.
The group said that the genetic sequences of the SARS-CoV-2 virus are critical to understanding the source of the pandemic. The COVID-19 virus has killed more than 760,000 Americans over the past two years.
“NIH’s failure to safeguard such genetic sequence information is of utmost public interest in light of China’s failure to cooperate with efforts to discover the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” the group said on Wednesday, when it filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Back in July, Empower Oversight submitted the FOIA request to the NIH seeking records that reportedly show agency officials agreeing to the Chinese researchers’ request.
Under law, a government agency has 20 working days to respond to a FOIA request.
Then in September, Empower filed two additional FOIA requests seeking records of what it called the agency’s “inadequate response” to three Republican senators demanding answers - as well as information on NIH’s response to its earlier requests.
The Senators, Chuck Grassley (Iowa), Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee), and Roger Marshall (Kansas), first wrote NIH Director Francis Collins on June 28. They cited a Wall Street Journal news report “that Chinese researchers ‘directed’ the National Institutes of Health (NIH) ‘to delete gene sequences of early COVID-19 cases from a key scientific database,’ called the NIH Sequence Read Archive.”
The Journal article confirmed that the agency deleted the sequences.
The senators listed seven questions they wanted answers to, including the circumstances under which such files can be deleted, and those responsible for the deletions.
On Sept. 16, they sent another letter to NIH saying that the first response “failed to fully and completely answer all seven questions and failed to provide the requested records.”
Seven additional questions were listed in the letter. In one, the senators asked for the names of communist Chinese government officials that requested the agency delete the data.
They also asked if NIH maintained back-up files of the deleted data.