Beijing declared Friday there will be no further examinations of the origins of the coronavirus in China, flatly rejecting calls by the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) for a renewed probe into the source of the virus.
The global pandemic has killed more than four million people and paralysed economies worldwide since it first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.
AFP reports the W.H.O. had urged China to share raw data from the earliest coronavirus cases to revive its probe into the origins of the disease that ended inconclusively back in January.
China hit back, reststating the initial W.H.O. probe was enough and calls for further data were motivated by politics instead of scientific inquiry.
“We oppose political tracing … and abandoning the joint report” issued after the W.H.O. 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.
The rejection of the lab theory by China has been challenged globally, with former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo telling Breitbart it is just “common sense” the Wuhan site was the start of it all:
Matt Perdie / Breitbart NewsMa rejected suggestions of new lines of investigation, shutting the door on any return by investigators to Wuhan.
He did so even as Chinese authorities began enforcing restrictions on movement in major cities as the country grapples with the biggest spike in infections since the beginning of the pandemic.
“The conclusions and recommendations of W.H.O. and China joint report were recognised 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.”
As Breitbart News reported, on Wednesday the official Beijing propaganda outlet Global Times sought to head off any push for further probes, saying the world needs “more early samples” of potential coronavirus patients prior to China’s first reports of a novel infection.
The Communist Party admitted to the destruction of early samples of coronavirus last year, making tracing the evolution of the disease far more difficult for international scientists even if China ever agreed to allow investigators to return.
AFP contributed to this story
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