Five Years Later, WHO Urges China to Share Data on the Origins of Covid

The World Health Organization (WHO) is pressing China to share data on the origins of the COVID-19, five years after the virus first broke out in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Rabat – The World Health Organization (WHO) is pressing China to share data on the origins of the COVID-19, five years after the virus first broke out in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

“We continue to call on China to share data and access so we can understand the origins of COVID-19. This is a moral and scientific imperative,” WHO said yesterday.

The organization added that lack of “transparency, sharing, and cooperation among countries” would prevent the world from adequately preventing and preparing for future epidemics and pandemics.

In response, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs insisted it in fact shared information about the outbreak and genome sequence of the virus with WHO and the international community “at the earliest time possible.”

Speaking at a press conference today, the ministry’s spokesperson Mao Ning said: “On the origins-tracing of COVID-19, China follows the spirit of science, openness, and transparency, actively supports and participates in global science-based origins-tracing, and firmly opposes any form of political manipulation.”

She added that China is “the only country in the world” to have invited more than one WHO expert groups to conduct joint origins study and organized several events for experts to share progress on the tracing of origins with WHO.

Ning stressed that China is ready to work with all parties to continue advancing global science-based origins-tracing study.

Since its outbreak in late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has claimed the lives of over 7 million people worldwide, according to WHO.

When asked about whether or not the world is better prepared for the next pandemic, WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a recent press conference that the world has learned many “painful lessons” from the previous pandemic.

However, he said that “if the next pandemic arrived today, the world would still face some of the same weaknesses and vulnerabilities that gave COVID-19 a foothold five years ago.”