The headline in the June 23 edition of The Wall Street Journal seemed ominous enough: “Chinese Covid-19 Gene Data That Could Have Aided Pandemic Research Removed From NIH Database.”

Why on earth would the National Institutes of Health do such a thing? That’s especially important given that the data, which was a series of gene sequences from coronavirus samples obtained from COVID-19 patients in Wuhan in January and February 2020, could help us solve the mystery (such as it is) about the genesis of the pandemic.

As to that mystery, our goal is to get to the truth, and in doing so to help those dead-enders — those folks on the Left who still believe that Donald Trump can’t possibly be right about the origins of the virus; those folks who therefore believe that this deadly plague was naturally occurring, and that it materialized when, as Jon Stewart so hilariously surmised, “a pangolin kissed a turtle” or maybe when “a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey.”

The ever-growing evidence tells open-minded folks that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab — the Wuhan Institute of Virology, specifically.

Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon and public health expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, told journalist Bret Baier that the removal of the data from the NIH archives was the deletion of “essentially the Rosetta Stone” of COVID-19. “Those sequences … enable virologists to trace the drift or manipulation of a genetic code,” said Makary, who called it “very unusual” for genetic data to be deleted from the NIH database.

But that’s not the most unusual part: The request to delete this information came from a Chinese researcher.

Never fear, though: As the Journal reports, the NIH “said it was reviewing the removal of genetic data about the Covid-19 virus from an agency-run archive after a scientist raised concerns about the episode earlier this summer.”

Senate Republicans want some answers. “The efforts by Chinese researchers to delete the data demands additional explanation,” wrote Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and Roger Marshall (R-KS) in the letter to NIH Director Francis Collins.

As the Journal continues: “In a reply to the senators dated Sept. 8, Dr. Collins said a review was under way to determine ‘whether appropriate steps were taken to assess this withdrawal request.’ An NIH spokeswoman on Sunday said that the review had been completed and that NIH leaders would weigh the findings.”

It’d be nice if the rest of us could weigh the findings, too. Otherwise, we might be left to conclude that some folks at the NIH were in cahoots with the ChiComs.

Where does the investigation into COVID’s origins currently stand? Sadly, at something of a standstill. Late last month, U.S. intelligence agencies delivered a report to Joe Biden, telling him that a lack of information “made it difficult to reach a definitive conclusion on the origin of the pandemic.”

Here, it’ll be interesting to see just how interested Joe Biden is in learning the truth about this pandemic — especially as it relates to his friends, the communist Chinese.