‘It’s inexcusable.’ WHO blasts China for not disclosing potential data on COVID-19’s origin

Maria Van Kerkhove has had a crazy, busy week. The infectious disease epidemiologist who oversees the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) program on emerging diseases and zoonoses began Sunday morning with a start: A researcher contacted her and said colleagues had uncovered crucial new data from China that speak to the origin of the pandemic. The researcher told Van Kerkhove—who was preparing to leave her home in Geneva for a flight to Oman—that a team led by George Gao, former head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, had sat on potentially important genetic sequences from samples it collected in early 2020 at a Wuhan food market where the first cluster of COVID-19 cases occurred. Last night, The Atlantic and Science published the first news stories about the previously undisclosed data, which was Topic A at a WHO press conference this morning. “These data could have—and should have—been shared 3 years ago,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “We continue to call on China to be transparent in sharing data, and to conduct the necessary investigations and share the results.” The group that contacted Van Kerkhove found that in June 2022, the Chinese researchers had deposited in a virology database called GISAID never-before-seen genomic information from samples taken from stalls at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan. The sequences, which G...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news