China rejects need for further WHO coronavirus origins probe

FILE PHOTO: P4 laboratory (center) on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been accused of being the source of the coronavirus pandemic. AFP via The Straits Times/Asia News Network

BEIJING — China on Friday rejected the World Health Organization’s (WHO) calls for a renewed probe into the origins of COVID-19, saying it supported “scientific” over “political” efforts to find out how the virus started.

Pressure is once more mounting on Beijing to consider a fresh investigation into the origins of a pandemic that has killed more than four million people and paralyzed economies worldwide since it first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.

A WHO team of international experts went to Wuhan in January 2021 to produce a first phase report, which was written in conjunction with their Chinese counterparts. It failed to find a conclusive position on how the virus began.

On Thursday the WHO urged China to share raw data from the earliest COVID-19 cases to revive its probe into the origins of the disease.

China hit back, repeating its position that the initial investigation was enough and that calls for further data were motivated by politics instead of scientific inquiry.

“We oppose political tracing … and abandoning the joint report” issued after the WHO expert team’s Wuhan visit in January, vice foreign minister Ma Zhaoxu told reporters. “We support scientific tracing.”

That report said the virus jumping from bats to humans via an intermediate animal was the most probable scenario, while a leak from the Wuhan virology labs was “extremely unlikely.”

Ma rejected suggestions of new lines of investigation.

“The conclusions and recommendations of WHO and China joint report were recognized by the international community and the scientific community,” he said.

“Future global traceability work should and can only be further carried out on the basis of this report, rather than starting a new one.”