After three years, the World Health Organization director urged China to provide its COVID-19 origins data on Thursday.
“Without complete access to the material that China has, you cannot say this or that,” said Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus when asked about the virus’s origin.
“All hypotheses are open. We’ve asked China to cooperate since WHO agrees.”
“If they do that, we will know what happened or how it started,” he added.
The virus was originally discovered in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Many believe it propagated via a live animal market before killing roughly 7 million people worldwide.
Chinese scientists temporarily posted early COVID pandemic data to a worldwide website last month.
It includes genetic sequences from over 1,000 environmental and animal samples acquired in January 2020 at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, where the first COVID epidemic occurred.
A team of international researchers found DNA from numerous animal species, including raccoon dogs, in environmental samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, suggesting they were “the most plausible conduits” of the disease.
China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention experts contested the international team’s results in a Nature magazine non-peer-reviewed paper this week.
The samples did not prove the animals were affected. However, these were collected a month after human-to-human transmission began at the market, so even if they were COVID-positive, the animals might have gotten the virus from people.
Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s COVID-19 technical head, said the latest Chinese data provided “clues” but no solutions. She said the WHO was working with scientists to learn more about the early 2019 cases, including their locations.
She stated WHO did not know if China had done some essential studies.
She noted that the WHO had requested the actual data from a recent U.S. Energy Department investigation that revealed a laboratory leak in China caused the COVID-19 outbreak.
Comment Template