China has rejected the proposal of the World Health Organization (WHO) to renew probe into the origins of Covid-19, implying that the move is political rather than scientific.
In January 2021, a team of international experts under WHO went to Wuhan and produced a first phase report written in conjunction with their Chinese counterparts. However, they did not find a conclusive position on the origins of the virus.
WHO urged China on Thursday to share raw data from the earliest Covid-19 cases to revive its probe into how the disease began.
China has responded to WHO’s recent call by stating that the initial probe was enough and that calls for further data were politically motivated as opposed to the grounds of scientific inquiry.
Vice foreign minister Ma Zhaoxu said, “We oppose political tracing … and abandoning the joint report issued after the WHO expert team’s Wuhan visit in January. We support scientific tracing.”
According to the joint report, the most probable scenario was the virus jumping from bats to humans via an intermediate animal while a leak from the Wuhan virology labs was “extremely unlikely”.
Zhaoxu added, “conclusions and recommendations of WHO and China joint report were recognised by the international community and the scientific community.”
Since it first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the Covid-19 pandemic has killed more than four million people and paralysed economies worldwide.
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