Beijing: On Friday, China rejected a renewed WHO probe into the origins of COVID-19, saying it supported ‘scientific’ research over ‘political’ efforts to figure out how the virus began.
Beijing is once again under pressure to initiate a fresh investigation into the origins of a pandemic that has killed more than four million people and paralyzed economies worldwide since it first broke out in Wuhan, in central China.
In January 2021, a WHO team of international experts went to Wuhan to create a first phase report with their Chinese counterparts. The report failed to come to a definitive conclusion on how the virus started. China was urged by the WHO on Thursday to share raw data from the earliest COVID-19 cases to restart its probe into the origins of the disease.
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China responded, saying that the initial investigation was sufficient and that calls for more data were motivated by politics rather than scientific inquiry. ‘We oppose political tracing … and abandoning the joint report’ following the WHO expert team’s visit to Wuhan in January, vice foreign minister Ma Zhaoxu said. ‘We support scientific tracing.’
According to the report, a virus jump from bats to humans via an intermediate animal was the most likely scenario, whereas a leak from the Wuhan virology labs was ‘extremely unlikely.’
Ma rejected suggestions for new lines of investigation. ‘The conclusions and recommendations of WHO and China joint report were recognized by the international community and the scientific community,’ he said. ‘Future global traceability work should and can only be further carried out on the basis of this report, rather than starting a new one.’
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