China urges WHO to be ‘scientific and impartial’ while tracing Covid-19 origins
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Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the WHO team on Feb 3, 2022.
PHOTO: REUTERS
BEIJING - The head of China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Saturday urged the World Health Organisation (WHO) to return to a “scientific and impartial” position when tracing the origins of Covid-19.
At a press conference, CDC director Shen Hongbing warned the WHO against politicising the source of the virus, or becoming a tool of another country.
“Some forces and figures who instigated and participated in politicising the origin-tracing issue and attempting to smear China should not think that the eyes of the scientific community around the world will be fooled by their clumsy manipulation,” he said, repeating a frequent talking point.
“We urge relevant people from the WHO to return to a scientific and impartial stance, and not to actively or be forced to become a tool for individual countries to politicise the traceability of the coronavirus.”
WHO officials had said the origins study had been hampered due to a lack of raw data from the early days of the pandemic.
Asked why it had taken China so long to present its findings, Professor Shen said there was a peer-review process and more follow-up research needed to be done.
Chinese scientists had taken part in a joint origin study with an international panel of experts from the WHO in early 2021, he said.
But officials had rejected proposals for a second mission later that year to investigate further hypotheses, including that the virus had leaked from a lab.
“We will not accept such an origins-tracing plan as it, in some aspects, disregards common sense and defies science,” then Vice-Minister of the National Health Commission Zeng Yixin had said in July 2021.
The coronavirus that causes Covid-19 first surfaced in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan in late 2019 and quickly evolved into a global pandemic, killing seven million people to date.
While some scientists believe that it could have jumped from an intermediary animal in the market to a human, there are also suggestions, including most recently from the United States Energy Department, that it could have been the result of a lab leak.
The suggestions, which gained traction in mid-2020, resulted in a long-running diplomatic spat.
At least two Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesmen have also accused the US of leaking the virus in Wuhan during military games in late 2019.
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had on Thursday pressed China to share all its information about the virus’ origins, saying that until that happened, all hypotheses remain on the table.
On Monday, Chinese scientists published a peer-reviewed paper in the Nature journal analysing samples taken more than three years ago from the Huanan market, which has been shut since early January 2020.
While the findings show that the environmental swabs contain genetic data from wild animals and Sars-CoV-2, they do not definitively confirm that the animals in the market were infected with the virus.
