No, nothing suspicious about that at all...

According to EO, the documents show that “Professor Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center later sent the group an email stating that the deleted data seemed to support the idea that the pandemic began outside the Huanan market in Wuhan and that the matter must be analyzed properly.”

If the virus’s spread began outside of the market, it would undermine the official Chinese government claim, and thus reinforce claims of experts in the United States and elsewhere that the pandemic likely escaped from within the Wuhan lab.

The EO report also claims that NIH communications staff members were using off-the-record emails to advise “reporters toward more favorable coverage concerning termination of public access to the sequences by The Washington Post, and away from coverage by The New York Times, whose ‘tone’ had been criticized in communications among NIH officials.”

In addition, EO said NIH claims to have retained copies of the deleted data “for preservation purposes,” although the federal agency has refused to conduct a transparent examination of it.