China has sharply criticized the push by Western nations to portray the country as hiding vital data on COVID-19 from World Health Organization (WHO) scientists, who have said they encountered no such barriers to their study.
The scientists who traveled to Wuhan earlier this year as part of a study into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, have written a new article in which they warn that “the process has stalled,” endangering the ability to collect time-sensitive data such as antibodies and placing the entire project in peril.
In an article published in Nature on Wednesday, the 12-person international team reviewed their lines of inquiry in the March report and the leads they reported, noting that some of those leads are in danger of drying up before long.
“Crucially, the window is rapidly closing on the biological feasibility of conducting the critical trace-back of people and animals inside and outside China. SARS-CoV-2 antibodies wane, so collecting further samples and testing people who might have been exposed before December 2019 will yield diminishing returns,” they wrote, noting that not only do Chinese wildlife farms employ some 14 million people, many of the farms have been closed due to the pandemic and the animals culled, “making any evidence of early coronavirus spillover increasingly difficult to find.”
The Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, where a number of people related to the market fell ill with a virus, sits closed in Wuhan, China, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020.
While the scientists said they were “pleased” by the prospect of a more organized structure for outbreak origins investigations, they warned that applying it to the SARS-CoV-2 probe “runs the risk of adding several months of delay.”
Other data they seek is less time-sensitive, such as raw data collected on the 174 COVID-19 cases identified in 2019. The team notes the information wasn’t part of their mandate, but that the WHO has subsequently asked for it and that it’s necessary for a second phase of their investigation.
The team traveled in January 2021 to Wuhan, the Chinese city where the first recorded outbreak of COVID-19 began in late 2019, to conduct a joint study with Chinese scientists into the origins of the virus. They explored four possible vectors, noting that direct or indirect zoonotic introduction were the most plausible pathways – that is, that the virus began in animals and made the jump to humans, either from the reservoir animal population directly into humans or by way of an intermediate host.
A four possibility which they had not initially set out to explore, but which was added later, was whether it had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As Sputnik has reported, the suggestion gained currency as a conspiracy in far-right circles in early 2020 before being used by then-US President Donald Trump to shift blame onto China for the pandemic, which he called “the China virus” and “kung flu.”
They noted on Wednesday that they “held frank discussions with key scientists in the relevant Wuhan institutions and that “when we reviewed the responses to our questions on this issue, and all other available data, we found no evidence for leads to follow up.”
(FILES) This file photo taken on April 17, 2020 shows an aerial view of the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province
Dissatisfied with their report, US President Joe Biden ordered the US intelligence community to conduct their own COVID-19 origins investigation, noting even the IC was divided about whether or not the virus had escaped the Chinese lab. That report, quietly delivered to the White House on Tuesday, was just as inconclusive, according to a report by the Washington Post that cited administration insiders.
“We have invited WHO experts to China twice for origins research. Together with their Chinese colleagues, they have compiled an authoritative joint report. We urge the US to stop the clumsy trick of shifting blames to smear and denigrate China, disclose and test data of early cases at home as soon as possible and invite WHO experts to conduct origins research in the US as soon as possible so as to give the international community and the American people an explanation based on science and justice,” Wang added.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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