MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

China rejects any further investigation to COVID-19 origins at the Wuhan lab

WHO chief Tedros called on Beijing to be transparent, open and cooperate on a second phase of the investigation, to definitively eliminate the lab leak hypothesis.

China openly rejected the World Health Organization request for more information, and transparency, regarding an investigation into the origins of the COVID 19 pandemic.

WHO is also under strong pressure to organize an in depth investigation into the pandemic's origin, given the modest results of the organization's team sent to China's Wuhan province last January, where the disease was first reported.

Earlier this week WHO chief Tedros admitted that during the first phase of the investigation, the team of independent international experts did not have access to the raw data of the outbreak of the disease and the suspicion of a lab leak of the virus in China was further reaffirmed.

Tedros thus called on Beijing to be transparent, open and cooperate on a second phase of the investigation, to definitively eliminate the lab leak hypothesis.

However Beijing on Friday pointed out that China had allowed “access to the original data that needed special attention”, although admitting that some of the information “involves personal privacy”.

The Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian also empathically rejected the theory of the virus leak from the virology lab in Wuhan.

He added that the team of experts visiting China “had agreed that the hypothesis of a lab leak had led to the virus outbreak is extremely unlikely”, and warned that “the issue should not be politicized”.

Beijing's reaction to such hypothesis has been to blast any such suggestion as politically motivated and unscientific.

But even with ex president Trump's aggressiveness on the issue out of the field, such an option has again resurfaced and Tedros said further investigation could help rule out completely such hypothesis.

Last May president Joe Biden ordered US intelligence agencies to investigate the origin of the pandemic including the hypothesis of a lab leak, which was one of former president Trump's favorite arguments to pound on Beijing. However at the time it was discarded believing it was an extreme right conspiracy theory.

However the hypothesis has again regained headlines following on reports from three scientists at the Wuhan Virology Institute who became seriously ill after visiting a bats' cave in Yunnan.

The theory of a natural origin of the virus, supported by WHO experts and Chinese scientists during their first investigation in Wuhan, argues that the virus from the bats jumped to human beings through some other animal.

Tedros at his conference in Geneva also mentioned that the Delta variant which surfaced in India and has rapidly spread to other countries has become the dominant strain in parts of Europe and the United States, and underlined that the pandemic is far from over.