Medical workers in protective suits work inside a makeshift nucleic acid testing laboratory amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Beijing. Reuters file photo
Shanghai: A day after the WHO Director-General asked China to share information about the origins of Covid-19, the head of China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) asked the global health body to conduct a “scientific and fair” study determining the origins.
Shen Hongbing has warned World Health Organisation to avoid politicising the source of the virus “or becoming a tool of another country.”
The World Health Organization on Thursday said that it was certain China had far more data that could shed light on the origins of Covid and demanded that Beijing share all relevant information immediately.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva that “without full access to the information that China has… all hypotheses are on the table.”
He said that the WHO has been asking Beijing to cooperate on the issue.
“If Beijing does provide the missing data we will know what happened or how it started,” the WHO chief said.
Covid-19 was first identified in China’s Wuhan in December 2019, with many suspecting it spread in a live animal market before spreading around the world and killing nearly 7 million people.
Scientific data from the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic was briefly uploaded by Chinese scientists to an international database in March. Among other important aspects, it included genetic sequences found in more than 1,000 environmental and animal samples taken in January 2020 at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, the location of the first known Covid-19 outbreak.
The data revealed that DNA from multiple animal species – including raccoon dogs – was present in environmental samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, suggesting that they were “the most likely conduits” of the disease, according to a team of international researchers.
With inputs from agencies
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