Scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) held a press conference this weekend to condemn the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) for requesting more information regarding the early spread of novel coronavirus in Wuhan, the origin city of the ongoing pandemic.
W.H.O. officials, including Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, expressed frustration in a press conference with the Chinese government on Friday, lamenting that the Communist Party had failed to provide critical data on early cases of the disease and on key locations in Wuhan, including the Huanan Seafood Market—which a former CDC head initially claimed was the source of the virus—and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—a top-tier infectious disease research facility.
In particular, W.H.O. officials demanded information regarding the animals being sold at Huanan—widely considered a “wet market” in which animals are sold live or slaughtered on-site—such as whether they were farmed or wild and where they originated.
“The origin of the new coronavirus is the wildlife sold illegally in a Wuhan seafood market,” Gao Fu, then-director of the Chinese CDC, said in January 2020. Gao, who publicly admitted that Chinese-made coronavirus vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates,” lost his job in July 2022.
The Chinese Communist Party has enthusiastically denied that China is the origin nation of the ongoing pandemic, despite no evidence existing of any human or animal infection of the novel coronavirus prior to those confirmed in Wuhan in late 2019.
Leaked Chinese government data published in 2020 by the South China Morning Post revealed that the first known cases of a human Wuhan coronavirus infection were documented in Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, on November 17, 2019.
During its press conference on Saturday, the CDC claimed that it did not find any traces of Wuhan coronavirus in donor blood tested in the city prior to December 2019. The agency spent much of its time condemning the W.H.O. for suggesting that, as the pandemic originated in Wuhan, studies on the virus’s origins must take place in that city.
The W.H.O. officials’ demands for more information “completely go against the scientific spirit, and they are disrespectful to the scientists from around the world who participated in the early origins-tracing effort,” the current CDC director, Shen Hongbing, told reporters on Saturday.
“This is a manifestation of the politicization of [Wuhan coronavirus] origins-tracing. The Chinese scientific community will not stand for this, and the international scientific community will not accept this,” Shen proclaimed, according to the state-run China Daily’s coverage of the press conference on Monday.
CDC researcher Zhou Lei claimed to be “surprised” by the W.H.O. expressing frustration with China in public and warned the United Nations body that it could lose its “credibility” for requesting more data.
“We conducted in-depth joint analysis and research, and the results were collectively approved by the WHO and Chinese experts at that time,” Zhou insisted.
The Chinese state-run Global Times propaganda outlet claimed that the W.H.O. experts asking for more data had actually “smeared China for lacking transparency.”
“Using twisted and incomplete pieces of evidence to slander China on the origins of [Wuhan coronavirus] will only undermine the international body’s credibility and impair investigations on the virus said experts,” the Global Times added.
The W.H.O. experts at Friday’s press conference openly admitted their evidence was “incomplete,” the comments outraging China stated so precisely, and requested that Beijing complete the W.H.O.’s panel of evidence.
“Without full access to the information that China has, you cannot say this or that – all hypotheses are on the table,” Tedros, the W.H.O. director-general, told reporters last week.
“There’s more information that out there, we know that there’s more information that’s out there,” the W.H.O. technical lead on Wuhan coronavirus, Maria van Kerkhove, added, “and we need scientists, public health professionals, governments, to share this information. This is not a game.”
Van Kerkhove listed several specific questions that the Chinese Communist Party has yet to provide answers to.
“Further information that we need and we have been requesting for years now is where did those animals come?” Van Kerkhove asked. “From where were they farmed? How did they enter into the market? Was this wild animals, domestic animals? How are they traded? Where do they come from?”
Saturday’s Chinese CDC press conference did not answer these questions. Instead, the scientists touted the testing of human blood stored for donation purposes in Wuhan in late 2019 and early 2020, as well as coronavirus tests on animal samples at the Huanan market, but no origin information for those animals.
Van Kerkhove also suggested that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) could have played a role in the pandemic, either causing it through an accident or otherwise leaking a virus sample. She emphasized that the WIV theory was still “on the table” because the Chinese government did not provide evidence that allowed scientists to dismiss it.
“We need to know each of those factors that led to the emergence of this – whether it was from a zoonotic event or whether there was a breach in biosafety or biosecurity,” she explained.
“With regards to the lab, there’s lab audit data that could be evaluated and needs to be evaluated so then, as the director-general has said many times, so that the hypotheses that are on the table can be evaluated and assessed,” Van Kerkhove said later in the press conference, “and either we keep going with them or we are able to take them off.”
The W.H.O. organized a visit to Wuhan, including to the WIV, in early 2021, a year after Chinese officials admitted to destroying (“disinfecting“) biological evidence at the Huanan market and elsewhere in the city. The widely-panned report published after that visit dismissed a laboratory accident as unlikely but did not provide any clear evidence as to why. The report also notably stated that scientists tested about 80,000 animal samples and could not find a single animal in Hubei infected with Wuhan coronavirus.
Tedros dismissed the report shortly after it was released and demanded further investigation.
“I was a lab technician myself, I’m an immunologist, and I have worked in the lab, and lab accidents happen,” he said in July 2021. “It’s common.”
The official position of the Chinese government is that the likeliest scenario leading to the coronavirus pandemic was a laboratory leak in the U.S. Army facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland, that the U.S. government covered up by branding coronavirus cases as e-cigarette lung injuries.
Beijing has offered no meaningful evidence for this conspiracy theory and has not clarified how it would be possible to disguise a highly infectious coronavirus infection as an injury, given that doing so would have likely resulted in mass infections of health workers treating infected patients.
The Global Times noted that China CDC scientists said during Saturday’s press conference that, following the publication of their blood sample studies, which did not respond to the W.H.O.’s specific information demands, “now the onus falls on other countries who could be linked to the virus to undertake similar investigations, to hopefully shed light on where the virus came from.”
“We really really want the origins-tracing to be global tracing,” Zhou, one of the CDC scientists, said.
“Studies [into the America theory] cannot be done at the expense of the studies that need to be done in Wuhan and in China,” Maria van Kerkhove said on Friday, later adding, “the studies that have been requested in China have still not been carried out and we have to understand what has been done with the markets what has been done in terms of the earliest cases.”
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