The fact that this informative data set was deleted suggests implications beyond those gleaned directly from the recovered sequences.

There is no obvious scientific reason for the deletion: the sequences are concordant with the samples described in Wang et al. (2020a,b), there are no corrections to the paper, the paper states human subjects approval was obtained, and the sequencing shows no evidence of plasmid or sample-to-sample contamination.

In a new study, I identify and recover a deleted set of #SARSCoV2 sequences that provide additional information about viruses from the early Wuhan outbreak: https://t.co/1zdeiOQ0vo (1/n)

— Bloom Lab (@jbloom_lab) June 22, 2021