WHO Chief Chides China For Not Sharing Data On COVID-19 Origin, Calls For Transparency

China should have shared information on the origins of COVID-19 three years ago to support scientific research into the matter and it should be more transparent now as well, World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 17th March, 2023) China should have shared information on the origins of COVID-19 three years ago to support scientific research into the matter and it should be more transparent now as well, World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday.

"These data could have and should have been shared three years ago. We continue to call on China to be transparent in sharing data and to conduct the necessary investigations and share the results. Understanding how the pandemic began remains both a moral and scientific imperative," he told a press conference.

On Sunday, the WHO was made aware of data published in January on the GISAID (Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data) database. The data was provided by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and concerned samples from Wuhan, a Chinese city where the pandemic started.

The WHO contacted China and asked to share the data, so that it could be analyzed, but after that the data was removed from the database.

In March 2021, the WHO published its report on the origins of COVID-19. The document stated that the introduction of the virus "through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway." The team of experts behind the report consisted of 17 Chinese scientists and 17 scientists from other countries, as well as from the WHO and other specialized international organizations. The research was conducted from January 14 to February 10, 2021 in China's Wuhan.

However, in February, the US Department of Energy said that an accidental leak from a Chinese laboratory was the most possible cause of the pandemic, though the intelligence agencies of the United States remained divided on the matter.