China accuses WHO of politicising search for Covid origins after complaints about lack of transparency
- The UN health agency recently appealed to China to cooperate by sharing whatever information it had
- Shen Hongbing, the head of China’s CDC, complained that senior WHO officials were ‘going against the spirit of science’ and urged them to remain impartial
It has also said it believes China has far more information that could shed light on the origins of the disease, which has killed around 7 million people over the past three years.
Shen Hongbing, director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Saturday: “We urge relevant persons from the World Health Organization to return to a scientific and impartial stance, and not to actively or be forced to become a tool for individual countries to politicise the origins of Covid-19.”
At a press conference at the State Council Information Office, he referred to a preliminary joint investigation between China and the WHO carried out in Wuhan in 2021, saying China had provided “all relevant information about the origins it had at the time, and did not conceal any cases, samples, and test and analysis results”.
“Recently, individual officials and experts of the World Health Organization have expressed their views and hastily denied the results from that time, which is completely against the spirit of science, and is intolerable to the Chinese scientific community, and cannot be accepted by the global scientific community,” Shen said.
