Health

WHO says China sitting on Covid-19 data, calls on Beijing to share material

Geneva, Mar 17 (EFE).- The World Health Organization on Friday made an umpteenth call on China to make available all of its scientific data that could point to the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic after a Chinese report on a genetic and molecular study from a wet market in Wuhan disappeared from a public platform.

The Chinese data in question, which was collated by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, was uploaded to an open access scientific platform in January and analyzed by European experts who reported their results to WHO.

The original data has since vanished from the site and Beijing is yet to provide the information as requested by the WHO, the global agency said.

“We continue to call on China to be transparent in sharing data, and to conduct the necessary investigations and share the results,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press briefing Friday.

“Understanding how the pandemic began remains both a moral and scientific imperative,” he added.

The health agency also warned that the findings, while an important piece of the puzzle, did not offer a definitive conclusion on the origins of the pandemic.

“We have a duty to those we have lost to find out how it started. And we have a duty to those who will follow us to make the world safer,” Tedros said. EFE

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