Quick Hits: July 13, 2021

*** The Senate on Monday unanimously confirmed Jen Easterly as head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. A former National Security Agency and White House counterterrorism and cyber official, Easterly was nominated for the position in April.

*** Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., and Mark Green, R-Tenn., want to know why the National Institutes of Health allowed data on the virus that causes COVID-19 to be deleted from NIH's Sequence Read Archive.

“In March 2020, scientists at Wuhan University uploaded 241 genetic sequences to the Sequence Read Archive, which is managed by the National Library of Medicine within the NIH,” the lawmakers wrote in a July 9 letter to NIH Director Francis Collins. “However, those scientists requested for some of these sequences to be withdrawn from the database in June 2020, and that request was approved.”

The letter outlines several questions regarding NIH's policies for such data deletions, and requests answers by July 14.