The World Health Organization team sent to China to investigate the origins of the COVID virus have been frustrated in their efforts to secure key data.
Team member Dominic Dwyer, infectious disease expert, said that they had only been given a summary instead of the raw patient data that they had requested.
Raw, anonymised patient data is part of standard outbreak investigation, Dwyer said, and this was particularly important because half of the initial 174 patients had no contact with the wet market.
“That’s why we’ve persisted to ask for that,” said Dwyer. “Why that doesn’t happen, I couldn’t comment. Whether it’s political or time or it’s difficult.”
Although Wuhan is the site of the initial outbreak, China has sought to cast doubt on its origin there, pointing to a source outside the country that may have come in with frozen food.
US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that he had “deep concerns” over the initial findings of the investigation, saying that “It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government.”
Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO delegation leader, said that the virus likely had an animal origin and may have taken a “very long and convoluted path involving also movements across borders”. The possibility that it may have travelled in frozen food is worth investigating, he added.
After their two week quarantine, the WHO team members were only allowed to go on visits organised by their Chinese hosts. Thea Kolsen Fischer, an immunologist and another WHO team member, said to the New York Times that she saw the investigation as “highly geopolitical”.
“Everybody knows how much pressure there is on China to be open to an investigation and also how much blame there might be associated with this,” she said.
Team member Peter Daszak, and president of the EcoHealth Alliance, said that it “was not my experience”.
“As lead of animal/environment working group I found trust and openness with my China counterparts. We did get access to critical new data throughout,” he tweeted.
“New data included environmental and animal carcass testing, names of suppliers to Huanan market, analyses of excess mortality in Hubei, range of Covid-like symptoms for months prior, sequence data linked to early cases and site visits with unvetted live question and answer.”
Source: The Guardian
