Beijing disagrees with WHO plans and considers the issue politicized

China rejects the World Health Organization’s plan to continue research to locate the source of the coronavirus.

Zhang Yixing, a spokesman for the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, speaking Thursday at a press conference on COVID-19, said:

To be honest, I was amazed when I first read about the WHO plan for the second phase of tracing the origin of the virus. In this research program, the hypothesis that “China’s violation of laboratory protocols caused the virus to leak” is prioritized. And this, I think, is contrary to common sense and scientific approach.

He called speculation about a possible leak of the virus from a Chinese laboratory as speculation. The Chinese authorities talk about the politicization of the issue, which has significantly worsened the state’s relations with the United States and some countries, claiming that the information provided by Beijing at the beginning of the pandemic was incomplete and opaque. China claims that there is no virus in the Wuhan laboratory that can directly infect humans, and refuses WHO to re-search for the source of COVID-19 in the PRC.

Earlier, our publication reported how the Director General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recognized that the organization hurried to exclude the connection between a pandemic and a coronavirus leak from a Chinese laboratory. In an interview with reporters, Gebreyesus said that the version that the virus could have leaked from a Chinese government laboratory in Wuhan was excluded from the list of possible variants of its origin prematurely. His statement contradicts a March WHO report, which said a laboratory leak was “highly unlikely.”

The WHO Director General noted that gaining access to the data has become a major challenge for an international team that traveled to China earlier this year to investigate the source of COVID-19. He told reporters that the organization he leads “is asking China to be transparent, open and cooperative, especially with regard to information, raw data,” requested by WHO in the early days of the pandemic.

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