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News > China

China Rejects in a Joint Statement a WHO Report

  • Liang Wannian, the most senior Chinese scientist in the WHO-led team that visited Wuhan, said the next stage is 'to search for the origins on a global scale'

    Liang Wannian, the most senior Chinese scientist in the WHO-led team that visited Wuhan, said the next stage is 'to search for the origins on a global scale' | Photo: Twitter @PM_Thornton

Published 31 March 2021
Opinion

Experts refute Western concerns about Beijing's transparency and WHO report's impartiality.
 

China on Wednesday rejected a joint statement by the United States and 13 other countries that expressed "concerns" over the World Health Organization's (WHO) report on the origins of Covid-19. 

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Hua Chunying, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said politicizing the issue of tracing the origin was immoral and unpopular and will only hinder global cooperation in studying the origins of the coronavirus. "These countries should reflect on themselves and ask, how has their own work against the epidemic gone, what have they done for international cooperation in fighting the pandemic," Hua said.

At the same time, the head of the team of experts from China investigating the origin of Sars-Cov-2 in conjunction with the WHO team, Liang Wannian, assured that his country shared the available information linked to the Covid-19 outbreak. During a press conference held in Beijing, the scientist refuted concerns expressed in Western countries after releasing the draft report prepared by WHO experts who visited the Asian nation last January and February.

Liang said his country acted with transparency and allowed the UN agency's team to visit all the sites of interest and meet with the specialists they requested. He added that China gave access to the necessary information to be consulted there. However, it did not allow photographing some documents or taking them abroad because it is illegal, according to national laws.

Liang advocated extending the investigation on to other geographic areas, as cases with probable Covid-19 symptoms have been reported in other countries and before the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan. He said that this effort would make it possible to find more early cases worldwide and identify potential carriers of the virus, not just bats, he explained. In this regard, he emphasized that the place where a virus is first reported is not necessarily the point of origin of the virus.

He appreciated that China, together with the WHO, has been the first country to investigate this pandemic's origin within a few months of its appearance. This type of investigation is usually carried out much later.

Earlier in the day, other Chinese experts said that Western politicians and media who have questioned the WHO investigation's impartiality are acting on political bias rather than scientific evidence.

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