‘Clues to understanding Covid-19 origins rests with China,’ says WHO chief

Geneva: World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Thursday urged China to share information about the origins of Covid-19, stressing that all conjectures would lead nowhere unless the Asian country was transparent.

The global health watchdog asked China to reveal all the information that it had on the virus, more than three years after the infection first emerged at a seafood market in the Chinese province of Wuhan.

“Without full access to the information that China has, you cannot say this or that,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in response to a question about the origin of the virus. “All hypotheses are on the table. That’s WHO’s position and that’s why we have been asking China to be cooperative on this.”

Covid-19 was first identified in the China’s Wuhan in December 2019, with many suspecting it spread in a live animal market before spreading around the world and killing nearly 7 million people.

Scientific data from the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic was briefly uploaded by Chinese scientists to an international database in March. Among other important aspects, it included genetic sequences found in more than 1,000 environmental and animal samples taken in January 2020 at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, the location of the first known Covid-19 outbreak.

The data revealed that DNA from multiple animal species – including raccoon dogs – was present in environmental samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, suggesting that they were “the most likely conduits” of the disease, according to a team of international researchers.

However, in a non-peer reviewed study published by the Nature journal this week, scientists with China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention have disputed the international team’s findings. They said the samples provided no proof the animals were actually infected. They were also taken a month after human-to-human transmission first occurred at the market, so even if they were Covid-positive, the animals could have caught the virus from humans.

The WHO has also asked the United States for original data that underpinned a recent study by the US Energy Department that suggested a laboratory leak in China had likely caused the Covid-19 pandemic, she added.

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