Advisers to the World Health Organization urged China on Sunday to spread the word All the information related to the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, shortly after the publication of new findings on an international database used to track pathogens.
A statement by a scientific advisory group affiliated with the World Health Organization stated that earlier this year, Chinese scientists published the new sequences of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as well as additional genetic data based on samples taken from a live animal market in Wuhan, China, in 2020.
Expressive
The statement indicated that the results were briefly published on the database of the Global Initiative for Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISID), which allowed researchers in other countries to view them.
The sequences indicated that raccoon dogs were present in the market and may have also been infected with the coronavirus, providing new evidence in the chain of transmission that eventually reached humans.
The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention later restricted access to the information, “apparently to allow further data updates”.
WHO officials discussed the matter with their Chinese colleagues, who explained that the new data was to be used to update an initial version of a study from 2022. The Chinese center plans to resubmit the paper to the scientific journal Nature for publication, according to the statement.
WHO officials say this information, while not conclusive, represents a new lead in the investigation into the origins of Covid and should be shared immediately.
“This data does not provide a definitive answer to the question of how the pandemic began, but every piece of data is important to bring us closer to that answer,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday.
He added, “This data could and should have been shared three years ago. We continue to call on China to be transparent in exchanging data, conducting necessary investigations, and sharing results.”
The World Health Organization tasked the advisory group with continuing to investigate the origins of the pandemic, which has claimed the lives of nearly seven million people around the world.
When asked by Reuters why the sequences had not been published before, George Gao, a professor at the Institute of Microbiology at the Chinese Center, said that this was “recently analyzed data and did not come up with anything new.” He said that the sequences were deleted by Jecid, not the scientists.
“All of this should be left to scientists to work on, not to journalists or the public. We are curious to know the answer,” he said in an emailed statement.
The Chinese authorities closed the Huanan wholesale seafood market in Wuhan after the emergence of the new Corona virus in the city in late 2019. Since then, the market has been the focus of studying whether the virus infected several other species before it was transmitted to humans.
The WHO and other scientists said they could not rule out the possibility that the virus emerged from a high-security laboratory in Wuhan that studies dangerous pathogens. China denies any such relationship.
