China rejects WHO's plan to revisit Wuhan lab leak theory

Beijing, July 22

China on Thursday categorically rejected the WHO's plan for the second phase of Covid origin-tracing in Wuhan, especially to probe the lab leak theory, as it dismissed reports that some of the employees of the facility were infected with the deadly virus before it spread to the city and the world.

China will not follow the World Health Organisation's suggested plan on the second phase of Covid-19 origin-tracing, Zeng Yixin, the vice minister of the National Health Commission (NHC), told a media briefing here. The work plan on the second-phase origins study proposed by the WHO contains language that does not respect science, he said.

Beijing Refuses to share details

• China has also refused to share the details about the hospital admissions,
• saying it constitutes a breach of individual privacy and the raw data.
• Liang Wannian, team leader of the Chinese side of the WHO joint expert team, said the study should focus on animals and it should be carried out in countries and regions with bat distribution.
• The US has been pushing for a probe into the possibility of Covid having leaked from the Wuhan lab since early 2020.

China's broadside against the WHO and its Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who previously won Beijing's praise and support for praising President Xi Jinping's handling of Covid, came after he asked China to be transparent and provide raw data. “Asking actually China to be transparent, open and cooperate, especially on the information, raw data that we asked for at the early days of the pandemic. We owe it to the millions who suffered and the millions who died to know what happened,” he had said.

Zeng said the plan had listed the hypothesis that China had violated lab regulations and leaked the virus as one of the major research objectives, and he was “very shocked” after reading the proposal. He reiterated Beijing's oft-repeated claim that the Covid broke out in several places in the world and China was the first to report about it in December, 2019. — PTI