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China pushes back at WHO criticism over delayed Wuhan data
Beijing urged World Health Organization officials not to be used as political tools after fresh accusations that Beijing delayed releasing key early data on COVID-19 considered by some scientists to be instrumental to understanding the virus’s genesis.
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China shared all material that it had gathered on Covid’s origin when it conducted a joint mission with experts organized by the WHO in 2020 and early 2021 and has not withheld data on any cases, samples or testing results, Shen Hongbing, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a briefing in Beijing on Saturday.
Recent remarks by some WHO officials that dismissed the joint mission’s effort were “a crude offense to the scientists around the world who participated in the initial-origin tracing work,” he said.
“We urge certain people at the WHO to come back to the position of science and impartiality, instead of becoming a tool for politicizing Covid’s origin by some country, whether voluntarily or forced,” Shen said.
Shen’s remarks come days after the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead Maria D. Van Kerkhove said in an editorial that the sharing of some viral samples from a food market in Wuhan three years after they were collected amounted to a lack of data disclosure that was “inexcusable.”
She said the WHO-China joint mission early in the pandemic was heavily criticized for the lack of access to raw data on early cases in China, which still hasn’t been granted.
At the heart of the spat among officials between the WHO and China is a new set of data on specimens collected three years ago at the market in Wuhan that Chinese researchers uploaded to the global genomic database GISAID earlier this year.
The data was uploaded to aid peer review of a study conducted by the China CDC but it was released to the public by GISAID staff “by mistake,” China CDC director Shen said at the briefing.
A group of international scientists found the data last month and their independent analysis showed evidence of the virus along with genetic material from several animals, including raccoon dogs, making it the strongest information yet backing the theory that it could have spilled over from animals to humans at the market.
Chinese researchers, led by the China CDC’s former director George Gao Fu, however, argued in their study of the specimens that the samples were insufficient to prove the COVID outbreak started there as a result of the virus jumping from animals to humans.
Chinese officials at Saturday’s briefing reiterated that conclusion, saying there isn’t enough evidence to prove the virus originated from raccoon dogs and spilled over to humans at the Wuhan market.
“Some experts suspect the animal genetic material present in these samples indicated the virus was passed on to humans from there but so far there’s no signs of animals getting infected at the market based on all existing evidence,” Tong Yigang, a professor specializing in microbiology and bioinformatics who led research in environmental and animal samples during the WHO-China joint origin mission, said at the briefing.
‘Evidence Chain’
“Many people hope to find such an evidence chain. We feel the same and very much hope to find out the source of the virus,” Tong told reporters, “but these data are insufficient and far from enough. It’s like we imagine something happened in certain ways and we constantly make conjectures based on that.”
Zhou Lei, a researcher from China CDC who also participated in the WHO-China joint mission, told reporters at the briefing that the Covid origin tracing effort should be expanded to other countries, as multiple studies, including the testing of blood donated before December 2019, and the tracing of animal trade supply chains and the testing of bats in China have all failed to yield any traces of the coronavirus.
The lack of COVID-19 antibodies in blood collected before December 2021 means there’s no Covid before that time, Zhou said.
“WHO is very important, its professionalism globally recognized and its science, rigor and fairness beyond doubt, but groundless accusations that seek to deny the achievements from our joint mission will only undermine trust in the agency,” Zhou said.
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