On February 3, 2021, members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origin of the Covid-19 coronavirus visited the Institute in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. Security personnel stood guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan.
Hector Retamar/AFP via Getty Images
- On Thursday, the WHO urged China to share raw data on the earliest Covid-19 cases in order to resume investigations into the origin of the disease.
- However, China rejected the WHO’s call, saying it supports “scientific” rather than “political” efforts to find out how the virus originated.
- The delayed and heavily politicized visit conducted by the WHO International Panel of Experts in January failed to draw conclusions about how the virus started.
On Friday, China rejected a call from the World Health Organization to reinvestigate the origin of Covid-19, saying it supports “scientific” rather than “political” efforts to find the origin of the virus.
The pressure on Beijing has once again increased, requiring consideration of a new investigation into the origin of this pandemic, which has caused more than 4 million deaths and economic paralysis worldwide since it first appeared in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
The WHO international team of experts traveled to Wuhan in January 2021 and co-authored the first phase report with their Chinese counterparts. The visit was delayed and severely politicized. It failed to draw a conclusion on how the virus started.
On Thursday, the WHO urged China to share raw data on the earliest Covid-19 cases in order to resume investigations into the origin of the disease.
China fired back, reiterating its position that a preliminary investigation is sufficient and that the motivation for requesting more data is political rather than scientific investigation.
Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu told reporters that after the WHO expert group visited Wuhan in January, “we oppose political tracing… and abandon the joint report.” “We support scientific tracking.”
The report stated that the spread of the virus from bats to humans through intermediate animals is the most likely scenario, and the leakage of the Wuhan Virology Laboratory is “extremely unlikely.”
Ma rejected the suggestion of a new investigation route.
“The conclusions and recommendations of the WHO and China joint report have been recognized by the international community and the scientific community,” he said.
“Future global traceability work should and can only be carried out on the basis of this report, rather than starting anew.”
Faced with China’s reluctance to open to outside investigators, experts are increasingly willing to consider the theory that the virus may have leaked from the laboratory. This theory was once considered a conspiracy propagated by the far-right in the United States.
Even WHO Director-General Tedros Tedros said that the initial investigation of the Wuhan Virology Laboratory was not thorough enough, and President Joe Biden in May ordered the US intelligence community to conduct a separate investigation of the source of the virus.
The World Health Organization last month called for the second phase of the investigation to include an audit of the Wuhan laboratory, which angered Beijing, and Deputy Health Minister Zeng Yixin said the plan showed “disrespect for common sense and arrogance for science.”
At the same time, the Danish scientist Peter Ben Embarek, who led the Wuhan international mission, said that a laboratory employee who was infected while collecting samples on the ground belonged to a possible hypothesis, that is, the virus How to spread from bats to humans.
He told the Danish public channel TV2 that the suspected bats were not from the Wuhan area, and the only people who could approach them were the staff of the Wuhan laboratory.
Ben Embarek previously admitted in an interview with “Science” that “politics is always with us” during the trip to Wuhan after China initially delayed the approval of the entry of international researchers.
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