China will not accept the World Health Organization’s plan for the second phase of a study into the origins of COVID-19, a senior Chinese health official said Thursday.
Critics say China continues to engage in a “massive” and still active cover-up on the true origins of the deadly global pandemic.
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Zeng Yixin, the vice minister of the National Health Commission, said he was “rather taken aback” that the plan includes further investigation of the theory that the virus might have leaked from a Chinese lab.
He dismissed the lab leak idea as a rumor that runs counter to common sense and science — but won’t let investigators check on the possibility.
“It is impossible for us to accept such an origin-tracing plan,” he said at a news conference called to address the COVID-19 origins issue.
Critics have said the Chinese government is actively suppressing evidence of the lab leak theory.
“The problem that we face here isn’t the WHO. It’s not even really Dr. [Anthony] Fauci,” Jamie Metzl, a WHO advisor, told Fox News last month. “The problem is the Chinese have engaged in a massive cover-up that is going on until today involving destroying samples, hiding records, placing a universal gag order on Chinese scientists, and imprisoning Chinese citizen journalists asking the most basic questions.”
“That’s what we need to get around.”
The search for where the virus came from has become a diplomatic issue that has fueled China’s deteriorating relations with the U.S. and many American allies. The U.S. and others say that China has not been transparent about what happened in the early days of the pandemic. China accuses critics of seeking to blame it for the pandemic and politicizing an issue that should be left to scientists.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of WHO, admitted last week that there had been a “premature push” after the first phase of the study to rule out the theory that the virus might have escaped from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan, the city where the disease was first detected in late 2019.
Experts aren’t convinced a lab leak is the likely cause. The question is whether the possibility is so unlikely that it should be dropped, or whether it merits further study.
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The first phase was conducted earlier this year by an international team of scientists who came to Wuhan to work under the supervision of Chinese authorities. The team was accused of bowing to demands from the Chinese side after it initially indicated that further study wasn’t necessary.
Zeng said the Wuhan lab has no virus that can directly infect humans and noted that the WHO team concluded that a lab leak was highly unlikely. He added that speculation that staff and graduate students at the lab had been infected and might have started the spread of the virus in the city was untrue.
Yuan Zhiming, the director of the biosafety lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said they had not stored or studied the new coronavirus before the outbreak. “I want to emphasize that …. the Wuhan Institute of Virology has never designed, made, or leaked the novel coronavirus,” he said.
The WHO team initially concluded that the virus most likely jumped from animals to humans, probably from bats to an intermediate animal. The experts visited markets in Wuhan that had sold live animals, and recommended further study of the farms that supplied the market.
Tedros said last week that he hoped for better cooperation and access to data from China. “We are asking China to be transparent, open, and cooperate, especially on the information, raw data that we asked for in the early days of the pandemic,” he said.
His words were echoed at the same virtual news conference by Germany’s health minister, Jens Spahn, who called on China to intensify cooperation in the search for the origin of the virus.
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Zeng said China has always supported “scientific virus tracing” and wants to see the study extended to other countries and regions. “However, we are opposed to politicizing the tracing work,” he said.
China has frequently sought to deflect accusations that the pandemic originated in Wuhan and was allowed to spread by early bureaucratic missteps and an attempted cover-up.
“The problem is the Chinese have engaged in a massive cover-up that is going on until today involving destroying samples, hiding records, placing a universal gag order on Chinese scientists and imprisoning Chinese citizen journalists asking the most basic questions,” Jamie Metzl, a WHO advisor, told Fox News last month.
China has largely ended local transmission of COVID through lockdowns and mask-wearing requirements and has now administered more than 1.4 billion doses of Chinese vaccines.
Just 12 new domestically spread cases were reported Thursday and China’s official death toll from the virus has remained unchanged for months at 4,636. Experts doubt that total is true.
The Associated Press contributed to this article