China on Friday rejected the World Health Organization’s calls for a renewed probe into the origins of the virus on the ground that “scientific” rather than “political” effort should be the focus to find out how the virus started.
In the press conference, the vice foreign minister Ma Zhaoxu opposed political tracing and abandoning the joint report. He further said, “We support scientific tracing.”
On Thursday, the WHO urged China to share raw data from the earliest cases to revive its probe into the origins of the disease.
China hit back by repeating its position that the initial investigation was enough and that calls for further data were motivated by politics instead of scientific inquiry. A WHO team of international experts went to Wuhan in January 2021 to produce a first phase report, which was written in conjunction with their Chinese counterparts
