People wearing masks at a market in Hong Kong to prevent the spread of coronavirus
China did not participate in the second phase of WHO’s investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, a top official announced on Thursday after the UN’s top health agency likely leaked the deadly virus from a bio lab in Wuhan. The next stage of its investigation.
China also dismissed reports that some employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology were infected with the virus before it spread to the central Chinese city and the world, killing more than 4 million people.
National Health Commission (NHC) deputy minister Zeng Yixin said at a media briefing that China would not follow the World Health Organization’s suggested plan on the second phase of COVID-19 origin-tracing.
The action plan on the Phase II original study proposed by the WHO includes language that does not respect science, he said. China’s broadening against the WHO and its Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who previously won Beijing’s praise and support for President Xi Jinping’s handling of the coronavirus, called on China to be transparent and provide raw data.
“Really asking China to be transparent, open and cooperating, especially on the information, raw data that we asked for in the early days of the pandemic. We are indebted to the millions of people for that and the millions of people who want to know.” Died what happened,” she had said.
More than four million people have died worldwide since the start of the pandemic in December 2019 and the WHO has faced mounting international pressure to investigate the origins of the virus.
According to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 tracker, more than 192,174,800 confirmed cases have been reported from across the world and 4,130,300 deaths have been recorded.
Ghebreyesus outlined the conditions for the next phase of the investigation. This included visiting some of the science research institutes. He has now called on China for greater cooperation regarding the early stages of the outbreak.
State-run Global Times reported that the WHO last Friday proposed a Phase II study of the origins of the coronavirus in China, which includes all laboratories and markets in Wuhan.
Zeng said the plan listed the hypothesis that China had violated laboratory regulations and leaked the virus as one of the key research objectives, and that he was “very surprised” after reading the proposal, State-run China Daily reported.
Instead, the core tracing of the next phase should focus on different regions and countries, he said, reiterating Beijing’s repeated claim that the coronavirus spread to many places in the world and China about it in December, 2019. Was the first to report. It emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
Zeng said he was surprised by the WHO’s action plan because it has been compromised by political manipulation and disregard for scientific facts.
He said China has allowed WHO experts to go to all the places they want to go and meet all the people they wanted to see earlier this year, adding that the WHO-China joint Study results can stand the test of time.
“We hope that the WHO can carefully consider the advice of Chinese scientists, investigate the origin of the COVID-19 virus as a scientific question free from political interference, and examine the origins of the virus in different countries.” can make a continuous and justifiably continuous inquiry into the origins of the world,” said the deputy minister.
Zeng also dismissed reports that three employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), from where the US alleges the virus may have leaked, fell ill shortly before the first documented cases of COVID-19.
He said there was zero infection among staff and students at WIV. China has refused to share details about the hospitalization, saying it is a violation of personal privacy and that the raw data asked by the WHO falls under national security regulations.
Liang Wanian, team leader from the Chinese side of the Joint Expert Team of the Global Study of the Origin of SARS-CoV-2 convened by the WHO, said studies on the origins of COVID-19 should be focused on animals and should be pursued further. In countries and regions with bat distribution.
NHC deputy director Zeng also said WIV contains no man-made virus and has never conducted gain-of-function research.
The US has been pushing for an investigation into the possibility of the coronavirus leaking from the WIV since early 2020. Former US President Donald Trump, who called the coronavirus the “Wuhan virus”, called for an investigation into the lab leak theory.
Trump’s successor Joe Biden has asked the intelligence community to redouble its efforts to get to the bottom of the origins of the coronavirus, with new reports raising questions about whether it spread from the laboratory in Wuhan.
Investigations into the origins of the pandemic were hampered by a lack of raw data, especially in the first days of its spread.
A joint WHO-China team had traveled to Wuhan and spent four weeks visiting various places, including WIV. It said in its report in March that the virus was possibly transmitted from bats to humans via another animal and that the virus’s leakage from the laboratory was an “extremely impossible route”.
But WHO chief Tedros, receiving the report, said “all hypotheses are on the table as far as WHO is concerned”. Rejecting the WHO’s second study on origins, China has campaigned extensively at home and abroad to block any such move to facilitate international investigators to investigate the COVID-19 origins in Wuhan.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told the media here on Tuesday that 55 countries have written to Tedros opposing the politicization of the core issue of the virus.
The Global Times quoted Chinese comments as saying that WHO chief Tedros had succumbed to political pressure from the US-led West.
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