China has again rejected the World Health Organization’s calls for a renewed probe into the origins of Covid-19 with a greater focus on the controversial Wuhan laboratory.
A delayed and heavily politicised visit by a WHO team of international experts went to Wuhan in January 2021 to produce a first phase report, which was written in conjunction with their Chinese counterparts, AFP reports. It failed to conclude how the virus began and devoted just 440-words to the lab leak theory in a lengthy report.
Yesterday, the WHO urged China to share raw data from the earliest Covid-19 cases to revive its probe into the origins of the disease. But China today repeated its position that the initial investigation was sufficient and that calls for further data were motivated by politics instead of scientific inquiry.
“We oppose political tracing … and abandoning the joint report” issued after the WHO expert team’s Wuhan visit in January, vice foreign minister Ma Zhaoxu said.
We support scientific tracing … The conclusions and recommendations of WHO and China joint report were recognised by the international community and the scientific community. Future global traceability work should and can only be further carried out on the basis of this report, rather than starting a new one.
China is continuing to conduct “follow-up and supplementary” research into the origins of the virus, he added.
AFP reports that in the face of China’s reluctance to open up to outside investigators, experts are increasingly open to considering the theory that the virus might have leaked out of a lab – once widely dismissed as a conspiracy and prohibited from being mentioned on Facebook – though it remains considered more likely it had a zoonotic origin.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said that the initial probe into Wuhan’s virology labs did not go far enough, while president Joe Biden in May ordered a separate investigation into the virus origins from the US intelligence community.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology “has many bat samples not yet worked out or results published,” according to emails of Ohio State University virologist Shan-Lu Liu, which were this week obtained by US transparency group Right to Know.
Meanwhile, US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony Fauci’s has been under pressure and accused of lying about the role the National Institutes of Health played in funding controversial research at the Wuhan facility to make viruses more transmissible.
It comes as Danish scientist Peter Ben Embarek, who led the international mission to Wuhan, said a lab employee infected while taking samples in the field falls under one of the likely hypotheses as to how the virus passed from bats to humans.
He told the Danish public channel TV2 that the suspect bats were not from the Wuhan region and the only people likely to have approached them were workers from the Wuhan labs.
As we reported earlier, he also said he was worried that the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was handling coronaviruses “without potentially having the same level of expertise or safety or who knows.”