The head of the World Health Organization said on July 15 that investigations into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic in China were being hampered by the lack of raw data on the first days of spread there and urged the country to be more transparent.
The virus that causes Covid-19 could have started spreading in China as early as October 2019, two months before the first case was identified in the central city of Wuhan, a new study showed on June 25.
Genetic sequences from more than 200 virus samples of early Covid-19 cases mysteriously disappeared from an online scientific database. A researcher in Seattle reported the recovery of 13 of those original sequences.
A senior Chinese epidemiologist said the United States should be the priority in the next phase of investigations into the origin of Covid-19 after a study showed the disease could have been circulating there as early as December 2019, state media said on June 17.
A report on the origins of Covid-19 by a U.S. government national laboratory concluded that the hypothesis of a virus leak from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is plausible and deserves further investigation, the Wall Street Journal said on June 7, citing people familiar with the classified document.
The U.S. intelligence community on May 27 acknowledged its agencies had two theories on where the coronavirus originated, with two agencies believing it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals and a third embracing a possible laboratory accident as the source of the Covid-19 pandemic.
President Joe Biden ordered aides to find answers to the origin of the virus that causes Covid-19, saying on May 26 that U.S. intelligence agencies are pursuing rival theories potentially including the possibility of a laboratory accident in China.
The United States called on May 25 for international experts to be allowed to evaluate the source of the coronavirus and the “early days of the outbreak” in a second phase of an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus.
A previously undisclosed intelligence report by the U.S. State Department shows that three scientists at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology received hospital care in November 2019 for influenza-like symptoms. The findings were on a State Department fact sheet that said they went to the hospital “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness.”
A joint China-World Health Organization (WHO) study into Covid-19 provided no credible answers about how the pandemic began, and more rigorous investigations are required – with or without Beijing’s involvement, a group of international scientists and researchers said on April 7.