China has done ‘little’ to investigate the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan during the first eight months of the pandemic, according to an internal report by the World Health Organization in August reviewed by The Guardian.
“After extensive discussions with and submission of Chinese counterparts, it appears that little has been done since January 2020 regarding epidemiological investigations around Wuhan,” the report said, according to The Guardian.
Some WHO researchers returned from a fact-finding season in Wuhan this month because China refused to share raw data on the first patients to receive COVID-19.
Dominic Dwyer, an Australian expert on infectious diseases who was traveling, told Reuters that the WHO team requested raw patient data on 174 people who received COVID-19 in December 2019, but the Chinese authorities only gave them a summary given.
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The frustrations come as the Biden government increases pressure on China to be more transparent about the origins of the pandemic.
“We need a credible, open, transparent international investigation led by the World Health Organization,” Jake Sullivan, national safety adviser, told CBS on Sunday.
“We do not believe that China has provided sufficiently original data on how this pandemic began to spread, both in China and eventually around the world.”
As the WHO and other researchers continue to investigate the origins of the pandemic, they are juggling various competing theories.
It is widely believed that COVID-19 jumped from a bat to an unknown intermediary, then to humans.
Researchers initially believed that the Huanan seafood market was possibly the place where humans were infected, as the market sells wild animals susceptible to viruses, but the discovery of earlier cases elsewhere has brought this theory into disrepute.
WHO researchers also investigated this month whether COVID-19 could have jumped from frozen food products, but many experts underestimated this idea.
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In the waning days of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has released a fact sheet that reads: ‘Several researchers in the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] became ill in the fall of 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms similar to COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. ‘
“In the document, the State Department notes that the US government does not know exactly where, when or how the COVID-19 virus – known as SARS-CoV-2 – was initially transmitted to humans,” Pompeo wrote on January 15. “We have not determined whether the outbreak started through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.”
The WHO repeatedly poured cold water on the theory that COVID-19 did escape from a laboratory in Wuhan.
Peter Ben Embarek, the leader of the most recent WHO mission to China, said on February 9 that the hypothesis of laboratory incidents is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus to the human population.
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Nevertheless, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently said that all options remain on the table.
“According to Reuters, Ghebreyesus said at a press conference on February 12 that questions were asked as to whether some hypotheses had been discarded.” “After talking to some members of the team, I want to confirm that all hypotheses remain open and require further analysis and study.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.