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.
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.
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.
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.
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