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China has done “little” to investigate the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan in the first eight months of the pandemic, according to an internal World Health Organization report from August that was reviewed by The Guardian.
“Following extensive discussions and a presentation from 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 fact-finding trip to Wuhan this month, partially disappointed that China refused to share raw data on the first patients to contract COVID-19.
Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious disease expert who was on the trip, told Reuters that the WHO team had requested raw patient data from 174 people who contracted COVID-19 in December 2019, but the Chinese authorities only gave them a summary.
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Frustrations come as the Biden administration ramps up pressure on China to be more transparent about the origins of the pandemic.
“We need a credible, open and transparent international investigation by the World Health Organization,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told CBS on Sunday.
“We do not believe that China has made available sufficient original data on how this pandemic began to spread, both in China and ultimately around the world.”
As the WHO and other researchers continue to investigate the origins of the pandemic, they juggle several competing theories.
COVID-19 is widely believed to have passed from a bat to an unknown intermediate animal and then to humans.
Researchers initially believed that the Huanan seafood market may have been where humans were first infected, as the market sold wild animals susceptible to the viruses, but the discovery of earlier cases elsewhere has discredited this theory.
WHO researchers also investigated this month whether COVID-19 could have skipped frozen foods, but many experts have played down the idea.
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In the closing days of the Trump administration, the press office of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo released a backgrounder stating: “Several researchers inside the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] fell ill in the fall of 2019, before the outbreak’s first identified case, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. “
Furthur in the document, the State Department noted that “the US government does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus – known as SARS-CoV-2 – was initially transmitted to humans.” , Pompeo wrote on Jan.15. “We have not determined whether the outbreak began with contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.”
The WHO has repeatedly cast cold water on the theory that COVID-19 escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.
Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the latest WHO mission to China, said on February 9 that “the hypothesis of laboratory incidents 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 recently said that all options remain on the table.
“Some questions have been raised as to whether certain assumptions have been ruled out,” Ghebreyesus said at a press conference on Feb. 12, according to Reuters. “Having spoken with some members of the team, I wish to confirm that all hypotheses remain open and require further analysis and study.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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