Joe Rogan on covid origins: what the evidence says · JRE #1718

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Two separate episodes are often conflated under the "deleted evidence" framing. First, in September 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology's public database of roughly 22,000 bat and rodent virus samples went offline; WIV virologist Shi Zhengli has said this was for security reasons following cyberattacks on staff email accounts, an explanation critics call inconsistent, but no independent investigation has confirmed the database's contents were destroyed rather than restricted from outside access. Second, in 2020 a set of early SARS-CoV-2 sequencing reads was removed from the US NIH's Sequence Read Archive at a Chinese researcher's request; virologist Jesse Bloom later recovered these sequences from cloud backups in 2021, and a 2025 peer-reviewed reexamination found the recovered data did not support claims of a deliberate cover-up, showing the sequences were largely consistent with already-published information. Neither episode has produced direct proof that evidence was destroyed as part of a deliberate cover-up: takedown and removal from public access are documented, but destruction motivated by concealing wrongdoing is not established. The full contents and current status of the WIV database remain unverified by outside researchers.