(Headline USA) China cannot accept the World Health Organization‘s plan for the second phase of a study into the origins of COVID-19, a senior Chinese health official said Thursday.
Zeng Yixin, the vice minister of the National Health Commission, said he was “rather taken aback” that the plan includes further investigation of the theory that the virus might have leaked from a Chinese lab.
He dismissed the lab leak idea as a rumor that runs counter to common sense and science.
“It is impossible for us to accept such an origin-tracing plan,” he said at a news conference called to address the COVID-19 origins issue.
The search for where the virus came from has become a diplomatic issue that has fueled China’s deteriorating relations with the U.S. and many American allies.
China has not been transparent about what happened in the early days of the pandemic.
China accuses critics of seeking to blame it for the pandemic and politicizing an issue that should be “left to scientists.”
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of WHO, acknowledged last week that there had been a “premature push” after the first phase of the study to rule out the theory that the virus might have escaped from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan, the city where the disease was first detected in late 2019.
The WHO is widely perceived to be largely controlled by the Chinese communist government.
The first phase of the investigation, of dubious intensity, was conducted earlier this year by an international team of scientists who came to Wuhan to work with their Chinese counterparts.
The team was accused of bowing to demands from the Chinese side after it initially indicated that further study wasn’t necessary.
Zeng said the Wuhan lab has no virus that can directly infect humans and noted that the WHO team concluded that a lab leak was highly unlikely.
He added that speculation that staff and graduate students at the lab had been infected and might have started the spread of the virus in the city was untrue.
Yuan Zhiming, the director of the biosafety lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said they had not stored or studied the new coronavirus before the outbreak.
“I want to emphasize that …. the Wuhan Institute of Virology has never designed, made or leaked the novel coronavirus,” he said.
The WHO team concluded, without evidence, that the virus most likely jumped from animals to humans, probably from bats to an intermediate animal.
The experts visited markets in Wuhan that had sold live animals, and recommended further study of the farms that supplied the market.
“In the next step, I think animal tracing should still be the priority direction. It is the most valuable field for our efforts,” Liang Wannian, who headed the Chinese side, said at Thursday’s news conference.
Tedros said last week that he hoped for better cooperation and access to data from China.
“We are asking China to be transparent, open and cooperate, especially on the information, raw data that we asked for in the early days of the pandemic,” he said.
Adapted from reporting by Associated Press.
