China did “little” to investigate the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan during the first eight months of the pandemic, according to an internal report by the World Health Organization in August, reviewed by The Guardian.
“After extensive discussions and presentations by Chinese counterparts, it appears that little has been done in terms of epidemiological investigations around Wuhan since January 2020,” the report said, according to The Guardian.
Some WHO researchers returned from a trip to find out the facts in Wuhan this month, partially disappointed that China refuses to share raw data about the first patients to receive COVID-19.
Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious disease specialist who was on the trip, told Reuters that the WHO team requested raw patient data from 174 people who took COVID-19 in December 2019, but Chinese authorities only provided a summary.
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The frustrations arise at a time when the Biden government is putting more pressure on China to be more transparent about the origins of the pandemic.
“We need a reliable, open and transparent international investigation led by the World Health Organization,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CBS on Sunday.
“We do not believe that China has made enough original data available on how this pandemic started to spread, both in China and around the world.”
While WHO and other researchers continue to investigate the origins of the pandemic, they are juggling several competing theories.
It is widely believed that COVID-19 jumped from a bat to an unknown intermediate animal and then to humans.
The researchers initially believed that the Huanan seafood market may have been the place where humans were first infected, as the market sold wild animals susceptible to viruses, but the discovery of previous cases elsewhere has discredited this theory .
WHO researchers also investigated this month whether COVID-19 could have jumped out of frozen food products, but many experts have downplayed that idea.
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In the last days of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s press office published a newsletter that said: “several researchers within the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] he fell ill in the fall of 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 and common seasonal diseases. “
Furthur in the document, the State Department noted that “the United States government does not know exactly where, when or how the COVID-19 virus – known as SARS-CoV-2 – was first transmitted to humans,” wrote Pompeo on 15 January. “We have not determined whether the outbreak started by contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.”
WHO repeatedly splashed cold water on the theory that COVID-19 escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.
Peter Ben Embarek, the leader of the most recent WHO mission to China, said on February 9 that the “laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population”.
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Despite this, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said recently that all options remain on the table.
“Some questions have been raised about whether any hypotheses have been ruled out,” Ghebreyesus said at a news conference on February 12, according to Reuters. “Having spoken to some members of the team, I would like to confirm that all hypotheses remain open and require further analysis and study.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.