Senior World Health Organization (W.H.O.) leaders, including Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, once again complained in a press conference on Thursday that the Chinese Communist Party was withholding critical data that could help the agency understand the origin of the Wuhan coronavirus.
“Without full access to the information that China has, you cannot say this or that – all hypotheses are on the table,” Tedros told reporters in response to questions about the progress the W.H.O. has made, or not made, regarding finding how the coronavirus pandemic began.
The W.H.O.’s technical lead on Wuhan coronavirus, Maria van Kerkhove, was more forceful, expressing frustration that Chinese officials have refused to hand over information on the animals available for sale at the Huanan “wet market” in Wuhan, considered a potential origin source for the pandemic. Van Kerkove described the crowded, potentially unsanitary market as at least a potentially “amplifying event” where the virus, already present in the city, spread, but lamented that the W.H.O. could not dismiss the market, or the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), as a source of the virus because it lacked too much data.
“Further information that we need and we have been requesting for years now is where did those animals come?” Van Kerkhove asked. “From where were they farmed? How did they enter into the market? Was this wild animals, domestic animals? How are they traded? Where do they come from?”
The novel coronavirus began spreading in Wuhan, central China, in late 2019. Chinese government documents obtained by the South China Morning Post identify the first confirmed case of a human being infected with the virus to have been documented in Wuhan on November 17, 2019. Knowledge of the spread of an infectious respiratory disease in Wuhan did not surface outside of China until early 2020, however, when the W.H.O. echoed China’s false claims that no “human-to-human transmission” was occurring in the country. The government of Taiwan – banned from participating in W.H.O. activities due to China’s influence on the body – had warned W.H.O. of intelligence suggesting the spread of infectious disease in Wuhan weeks before the denial of human-to-human transmission.
Following the rapid international spread of the Wuhan coronavirus, Chinese officials definitively blamed the Huanan market for causing what would rapidly become a pandemic.
“The origin of the new coronavirus is the wildlife sold illegally in a Wuhan seafood market,” Gao Fu, director of China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told a briefing in January.
The Chinese government rapidly “disinfected” the market, destroying potential virus samples, and did not allow a W.H.O. investigative team in Wuhan until early 2021, over a year after the pandemic began.
The official stance of the Chinese government currently is that the coronavirus pandemic began in Maryland as a result of a U.S. Army laboratory accident – a theory Beijing has presented no legitimate evidence to support. China most recently demanded the W.H.O. launch an investigation into America as the origin nation of the coronavirus pandemic in March.
Tedros – now free from pressure after winning uncontested re-election as W.H.O. chief in May – has largely ignored China’s requests and once again demanded that the Communist Party’s public health and science organs hand over critical pandemic data on Thursday. Tedros asserted that China’s cooperation was necessary because the world needs “to know the origin of the virus because of two things: one is the science issue and the second is the moral imperative.”
“Science, because, if we know the origin of this virus then we will know how to prevent the next one or how to manage it quickly – and the second one, the moral issue,” he continued, “many have lost their lives – almost how many million now? Close to 7 million … and this is, you know, even one life is significant. ”
“Until we know though … instead of making speculation, our position is to say all hypotheses are open,” Tedros concluded. “Some may say, ‘ok, this is more probable than the other,’ but still that cannot be the answer. We need to know the answer beyond reasonable doubt.”
Van Kerkhove, who has been more directly leading the investigation into the origins of the pandemic, listed specific information missing from the W.H.O.’s data troves necessary to address the potential theories on how the coronavirus began to spread.
“There’s more information that out there, we know that there’s more information that’s out there,” Van Kerkhove asserted, “and we need scientists, public health professionals, governments, to share this information. This is not a game.”
“We need to know each of those factors that led to the emergence of this – whether it was from a zoonotic event or whether there was a breach in biosafety or biosecurity,” she continued, referring to suspicions that the WIV, a top-level viral research facility known to be studying coronaviruses at the time of the first outbreak, is the source of the novel virus. The W.H.O. visited the laboratory in early 2021 but found no significant information; the report from the W.H.O.’s investigations in Wuhan did not offer any concrete conclusions on the virus’s origins.
“With regards to the lab, there’s lab audit data that could be evaluated and needs to be evaluated so then, as the director-general has said many times, so that the hypotheses that are on the table can be evaluated and assessed,” Van Kerkhove stated, “and either we keep going with them or we are able to take them off.”
Towards the end of the press conference, a reporter asked Van Kerkhove to comment on unsubstantiated theories propagated by the Chinese communist regime that the virus originated in America.
“We have said repeatedly said that we will follow the science anywhere that it takes us,” Van Kerkhove replied, “The study of the origins of Sars-Cov-2 [the Wuhan coronavirus] is a global study but you have to start where the first cases began.”
“Studies [into the America theory] cannot be done at the expense of the studies that need to be done in Wuhan and in China,” she asserted, later adding, “the studies that have been requested in China have still not been carried out and we have to understand what has been done with the markets what has been done in terms of the earliest cases.”
The Chinese government did not take questions on the W.H.O. officials’ remarks during Friday’s Foreign Ministry briefing and does not appear to have responded publicly at press time.