China disease expert says COVID-19 origins probe should shift to US
17 June, 2021
A senior Chinese epidemiologist said the US should be the priority within the next phase of investigations in to the origin of COVID-19 after a report showed the disease might have been circulating there as early as December 2019, state media said on Thursday (Jun 17).
The analysis, published this week by the US National Institutes for Health (NIH), showed that at least seven persons in five US states were infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that triggers COVID-19, weeks prior to the country reported its first official cases.
A joint study by China and the World Health Organization (WHO) published in March said the virus probably started in the country's wildlife trade, with the virus passing into humans from bats via an intermediary species.
But Beijing has promoted the theory that COVID-19 entered the united states from overseas via contaminated frozen food, while numerous foreign politicians are also calling for more investigations in to the likelihood it leaked from a laboratory.
Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told state-owned tabloid the Global Times that attention should shift to the US, that was slow to test persons in the first stages of the outbreak, and is also the home of many biological laboratories.
"All bio-weapons related subjects that the united states has should be at the mercy of scrutiny," he was quoted as saying.
Commenting on the US study on Wednesday, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said it was now "obvious" the COVID-19 outbreak had "multiple origins" and that other countries should cooperate with the WHO.
The origin of the pandemic has turned into a way to obtain political tension between China and the United States, with a lot of the recent focus on the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), found in Wuhan where the outbreak was first discovered in late 2019.
China has been criticised because of its lack of transparency in terms of disclosing data about early cases plus the viruses studied at WIV.
A written report by a US government national laboratory figured it was plausible that the virus had leaked from the Wuhan lab, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month.
A previous study has raised the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 might have been circulating in Europe as soon as September, but experts said this didn't necessarily mean it didn't originate in China, where many SARS-like coronaviruses have already been found in the wild.
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