When you have a former US president with a hold over an American politician party that has nearly 50% of the political power demanding more than $10 trillion in reparations, the discourse has moved away from "there is no accusation".

> a former US president with a hold over an American politician party that has nearly 50% of the political power demanding

The weight of that argument really went down (discredited it if you ask me) in light of the other accusations a former US president made before, during, and after his term. But he did highlight this effect really well:

> And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

The preprint leans pretty heavily in the "if it's not for science reasons it can't make sense at all" on the question of why data was removed, stating:

> However, the current study suggests that at least in one case, the trusting structures of science have been abused to obscure sequences relevant to the early spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan.

This is unambiguously an accusation that the Chinese authors acted nefariously.

It'll be mildly interesting to see Blooms reaction to the stated reason they were removed "[because] the sequence information had been updated, was being submitted to another database, and [the owners] wanted the data removed from SRA to avoid version control issues". Though at a guess he'll just not comment, since waiting for a reply from the NIH about why the data was deleted wasn't important enough to delay spreading his preprint.

> Though at a guess he'll just not comment, since waiting for a reply from the NIH about why the data was deleted wasn't important enough

https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1407445641609957380?s=...

"Fortunately, Sequence Read Archive has rigorous data tracking enabling them to determine when data deleted & stated justification by authors. In fact, @NIHDirector @NCBI have already determined this & generously shared info w me, but will let them share more widely."

Interesting, in the discussion of the preprint he writes

> Minimally, it should be immediately possible for the NIH to determine the date and purported reason for deletion of the data set analyzed here

and then he goes on to say the thing about the trust of the NIH being abused.

The tweets and the preprint are from the same day, so it appears he indeed mostly just ignores the fact there is a know and plausible reason for the data being taken down.

> Does anyone thinks this is a wrong way to look at things? I haven’t read it, but if it’s just a hypothesis / fact finding document, there is no accusation.

Just because there's no intention of accusing China doesn't mean China wouldn't take it as an accusation.

Exactly!

since US knows China may take it as an accusation, it feels there is no way to avoid accusing China therefore does it anyway. There are tons of interesting theories and stories around the endless chain of suspicion. I'd say Trump administration did a great job at destroying all mutual trust between the two. Now both sides have to take the worst intention of the other side for granted.