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China will not participate in the second phase of the WHO’s investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, a top official announced on Thursday, after the possibility of the deadly virus leaking from a bio lab in Wuhan was included by the UN’s top health agency in the next stage of its inquiry.
According to PTI report, China has also dismissed reports that some of the employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology were infected with the virus before it spread to the central Chinese city and the world, killing over 40 lakh people.
China will not follow the World Health Organisation’s suggested plan on the second phase of COVID-19 origin-tracing, Zeng Yixin, the vice minister of the National Health Commission (NHC), told a media briefing here. The work plan on the second-phase origins study proposed by the WHO contains language that does not respect science, he said.
China’s broadside against the WHO and its Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who previously won Beijing’s praise and support for praising President Xi Jinping’s handling of the coronavirus, came after he asked China to be transparent and provide raw data. “Asking actually China to be transparent, open and cooperate, especially on the information, raw data that we asked for at the early days of the pandemic. We owe it to the millions who suffered and the millions who died to know what happened, he had said.
