WHO Urges China To Detail Covid Origins Data

The World Health Organization has urged China to share data to help understand the origins of Covid-19, five years on from the start of the pandemic in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

On December 31, 2019, the WHO’s China office noted a cluster of “pneumonia” cases in a statement from health authorities in Wuhan. More than three weeks later, Chinese authorities locked down the city of 11 million.

Fears of a rapidly spreading virus gripped the nation, but – as authorities would later learn – the coronavirus had already spread far beyond China.

While much of the world has moved on from the pandemic lockdowns and restrictions, many questions remain about the source of a virus that killed at least seven million people, crippled health care systems and upended the global economy. And many experts say China’s opacity has made finding answers to the pandemic’s origins harder.

“We continue to call on China to share data and access so we can understand the origins of COVID-19. This is a moral and scientific imperative,” the WHO said in a statement on Monday.

“Without transparency, sharing, and cooperation among countries, the world cannot adequately prevent and prepare for future epidemics and pandemics.”

How the pandemic started has been a subject of intense scientific scrutiny as well as heated political debates, with opinions divided primarily over whether it originated from a natural animal spillover or a lab leak.

Many scientists believe the virus originated in the wild, before it jumped from infected animals to humans and spread through a wet market in Wuhan, though they haven’t been able to identify the intermediate host.

Suspicions that the coronavirus was leaked from a laboratory near the market, which was first dismissed as a conspiracy theory, have persisted and been endorsed by some researchers.

The search for the origins of the virus has been hugely controversial from the onset and a key source of political tension. The United States and other Western countries have repeatedly accused China of withholding access to original and complete data – which Beijing has vehemently denied.

WHO officials have also criticized China’s tight control of data access, with one official calling its lack of data disclosure “simply inexcusable” in 2023.

Chinese disease control officials responded at the time, saying China had provided the WHO’s expert group with all information it had on the origins of the virus “without withholding any cases, samples, or their testing and analysis results.”

CNN/Ejiofor Ezeifeoma