China today asked the World Health Organization (WHO) to “not politicize” the investigation into the origin of the coronavirus and assured that it has not carried out “any type of concealment”.
Zhou Lei, a researcher at China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told a State Council press conference that, in the early stages of the pandemic, the Asian country “shared all the results and data without any reservation or concealment,” state broadcaster CCTV reported.
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WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently declared that “China holds the key to understanding the origin of the coronavirus” and that the agency he heads has called on the Asian giant “to cooperate.”
According to Zhou, the possibility that the virus began to spread in the city of Wuhan as a result of a contagion between an animal and a human is “between probable and relatively likely”, based on the investigations carried out in the city by the group of Chinese experts of the Center for Control and Prevention.
The expert described the hypothesis that it arrived in Wuhan through an intermediate host as “between probable and very likely”, and that the outbreak in the city originated from frozen products, a theory that Beijing has emphasized since 2020, as “probable”.
According to experts, that the origin of the infections in Wuhan is in a laboratory is “extremely unlikely,” Zhou said.
The WHO expert group investigating the origin of the coronavirus recently raised the possibility that the raccoon dog, an animal sold in the Wuhan market where the pandemic began, was key in the transmission of the pathogen to humans.
Tedros stressed this week that different hypotheses about the origin of the coronavirus, which has caused almost seven million deaths worldwide, still stand.
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