Beijing: China rejected on Friday the calls of the World Health Organization to a renewed survey in the origins of COVID-19, affirming that it supported “scientific” on “political” efforts to find out how the virus has begun .
The pressure is once again mounted on Beijing to consider a fresh probe in the orgines of a pandemic that has killed more than four million people and paralyzed economies around the world because it emerged for the first time in the city. Chinese Central Wuhan.
A delayed and strongly politicized pair by a WHO team of international experts traveled to Wuhan in January 2021 to produce a first phase report, written in conjunction with their Chinese counterparts. He failed to conclude how the virus started.
Thursday, WHO urged China to share gross data from the first cases of COVID-19 to revive its probe in the origins of the disease.
China has affected, repeating its position that the initial investigation was sufficient and that additional data were motivated by the policy instead of a scientific survey.
“We oppose political traceability … and give up the joint report” issued after Wuhan’s visit to the WHO Expert Team in January, Foreign Minister, Ma Zhaoxu, told reporters . “We support scientific tracing.”
This report stated that the virus jumps bats to humans via an intermediate animal was the most likely scenario, while Wuhan’s virological laboratory leak was “extremely unlikely”.
MA rejected suggestions for new lines of investigation.
“The conclusions and recommendations of the WHO and China’s joint report have been recognized by the international community and the scientific community,” he said.
“Future global traceability works should and can only be done on the basis of this report rather than starting a new one.”
Laboratory Leak Theory
Faced with China’s reluctance to open up to external investigators, experts are increasingly open to the theory that the virus could have escaped from a laboratory, once rejected as a conspiracy propagated by the United States.
Even the WHO Tedros Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that the first survey of Wuhan’s virology laboratories was not sufficiently distant, while President Joe Biden can order a separate survey of the origins of the Virus of the Virus. US intelligence.
A call that calls last month for the second stage of the investigation to include audits of Wuhan Infurered Beijing laboratories, with the Minister of Health of Health Zeng Yixin, saying that the plan showed a “lack of respect for common sense and arrogance towards science “.
Meanwhile, the Danish scientist Peter Ben Embarek, who led the International Mission to Wuhan, said an infected laboratory employee while taking samples in the field of one of the likely assumptions of how the virus is past of bats.
He told the Danish public channel TV2 that suspicious bats were not originally from the Wuhan region and that the only people who could have approached were workers from Wuhan laboratories.
Ben Embarek previously recognized in an interview with Science Magazine that “politics was still in the room with us” during the trip from Wuhan, who was embedded in delays after China, the initial approval of the entry of researchers international.
