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GENEVA: Data from World Health Organization researchers who traveled to China to investigate the origins of the coronavirus epidemic were withheld, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday (March 30).
The United States, the European Union and other Western countries immediately called for China to grant independent experts “full access” to all data on the original outbreak by the end of 2019.
In their final report, written together with Chinese scientists, a WHO-led team that spent four weeks in and around Wuhan in January and February said the virus had likely been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal, and that a laboratory leak was “extremely unlikely” as a cause.
One of the team’s researchers has already said that China refused to provide raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the global pandemic began.
“In my discussions with the team, they expressed the difficulties they encountered in accessing the raw data,” Tedros said. “I hope that future collaborative studies will include a more complete and timely exchange of data.”
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The inability of the WHO mission to even conclude where or how the virus began to spread in people means that tensions will continue over how the pandemic started and whether China has assisted efforts to find out or, as the United States has alleged, It has hampered them.
“The study of international experts on the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was significantly delayed and did not have access to complete original samples and data”, Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Korea, Slovenia, Britain, the United States and the European Union, they said in a joint statement.
“IT IS NOT EXTENSIVE ENOUGH”
Although the team concluded that a Wuhan laboratory leak was the least likely hypothesis for the virus that causes COVID-19, Tedros said the problem required more investigation, potentially with more missions to China.
“I don’t think this assessment is comprehensive enough,” he told member states in statements released by the WHO. “More data and studies will be needed to reach stronger conclusions.”
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WHO team leader Peter Ben Embarek told a press conference that it was “perfectly possible” that the virus had been circulating in November or October 2019 around Wuhan and thus spread abroad. earlier than documented so far.
“We had access to a large amount of data in many different areas, but of course there were areas where we had a difficult time getting to the raw data and there are many good reasons for that,” he said, citing privacy and other laws. restrictions. .
Second-phase studies were required, Ben Embarek added.
He said the team had felt political pressure, even from outside China, but had never been pressured to remove anything from its final report.
Dominic Dwyer, an Australian expert on the mission, said he was satisfied that “there was no obvious evidence” of a problem at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The European Union called the study “an important first step” but renewed criticism that the origin study had started too late, that experts had been kept out of China for too long, and that access to data and information first samples had been insufficient.
In a statement, Walter Stevens, the EU ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, called for more studies with “timely access to relevant sites and all available relevant human, animal and environmental data.”
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