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China rejects WHO push for more investigation into covid origins in Wuhan - The Washington Post

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China said it will not accept the World Health Organization’s suggested plan for a second phase of investigation into the origins of the coronavirus, pointing to obstacles ahead for international efforts to determine the source of the pandemic.

In a news conference on Thursday, Zeng Yixin, deputy head of China’s National Health Commission, fired back against WHO criticism of China’s level of cooperation, and said the U.N. agency’s proposed work plan did not respect science.

“To be honest, when I first saw the WHO’s second-phase traceability plan, I was very surprised,” he said. “Because in this plan, the hypothesis of ‘China’s violation of laboratory procedures causing virus leakage’ is one of the research priorities.

“From this point, I can feel the disrespect for common sense and the arrogant attitude toward science revealed in this plan.”

He said it was “impossible” for China to accept the proposal.

The joint WHO-China report on the coronavirus origins released in March had said the pandemic probably began naturally and called the possibility of a lab leak at the origin “extremely unlikely.” That conclusion was criticized by many scientists as preliminary, including by the WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus himself.

Last week, Tedros announced a five-part plan for follow-up research on the origins of the coronavirus. It called for deeper study in geographical areas with early outbreaks, more research of animal markets in Wuhan, and audits of research labs near where the first cases emerged.

Tedros also held a news conference in which he criticized China’s cooperation, saying the country’s government did not share “raw data” with the WHO team that visited Wuhan earlier this year to investigate the source of the initial outbreak.

At the Thursday news conference, Liang Wannian, head of the Chinese experts in the WHO-China team, acknowledged certain patient data was not supplied to the foreign experts, citing China’s patient privacy regulations.

“Just to protect the privacy of patients, we did not agree to provide original data, nor did we allow them to copy it or take photos,” Liang said. “At that time, the international experts also fully understood this. They believed that this was an international practice, not only in China.”

The WHO did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

The WHO-China origin-tracing efforts have come under criticism from scientists for being slow, incomplete and politicized, with holes and inaccuracies in the limited data.

The WHO said last week it will be updating the joint report to fix “editing errors” after The Washington Post reported on discrepancies in the report’s profiles of early patients. A spokesman said the WHO could not resolve a discrepancy in the reported location of the first official case in Wuhan — a potentially significant detail, as it would determine whether all the earliest official cases were located near the Huanan seafood market or not.

In May, President Biden called for further investigation into the possibility of a lab leak, ordering U.S. intelligence agencies to “redouble their efforts” to determine the coronavirus origin over the next 90 days.

Yuan Zhiming, a researcher from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the main lab under scrutiny, also spoke at Thursday’s news conference. He said the virus was of natural origin, calling it the "consensus in the academic community.”

Yuan said there has been zero covid-19 infections of WIV staff to date, and said the institute’s high-containment P4 lab had not had any pathogen leaks or accidental staff infection since it began operation in 2018. WIV also runs lower-security labs, and conducted some of its coronavirus research in them. The Post has reported WIV conducts some classified research and internally acknowledged unspecified safety lapses in November 2019.

Beijing has bristled at any suggestion of a lab leak, calling it a conspiracy theory. On Wednesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian called for an investigation into the U.S. military-run infectious-disease research lab at Fort Detrick, Md., as part of coronavirus origin-tracing, saying 5 million Chinese Internet users signed a petition for such a probe.

In earlier months, Beijing officials pushed the theory that the coronavirus was brought to China from overseas on frozen food packaging. This theory is largely dismissed by scientists outside of China due to the genetic similarity of SARS-CoV-2 to viruses previously found in bats in China.

Liang said China believed animal tracing should be the key direction for follow-up studies, and that it should encompass bats and other animals.

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