Not wow. This is routine. The NIH has a policy to let researchers delete data from the sequence archive for various reasons. The reason they deleted it is very suspect, but the actual act is unremarkable and doesn’t implicate the NIH.
This is another reason I'm so skeptical of the lab leak theory. People with no knowledge of epidemiology are willing to portray routine actions as horrific ethical violations, and it's difficult to tell when they are.
Yes, I have some training in adjacent areas and have found the political argument very frustrating. The molecular evidence is very compelling for natural evolution. The idea of a naturally discovered virus leaking from a lab is plausible, but the accusations of it being lab created are absurd.
The uploading process is done using code. It is super easy to screw it up especially if you are a trained biologist who learnt some python and bash from some random websites that stole their content from stackoverflow. So the process is there for that. Also likely for retractions where people have uploaded spurious data.
