China has rebuffed accusations by the World Health Organization that it failed to share vital raw data during their investigation into the origins of Covid-19, insisting experts were given adequate access when they visited the country this year.
The WHO is facing intensifying pressure for a new, in-depth investigation into the pandemic's origins after the UN agency sent a team of independent, international experts to China's Wuhan in January - more than a year after Covid-19 first surfaced there.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters on Thursday that one of the main challenges during the first phase of the investigation was that 'the raw data was not shared,' and urged China to 'be transparent, to be open and cooperate' on a second phase of the investigation.
But China's foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian insisted the country had allowed experts 'to see the original data that needed special attention,' although 'some information involves personal privacy and cannot be copied and taken out of the country.'
China has rebuffed accusations by the World Health Organization that it failed to share vital raw data during their investigation into the origins of Covid-19, insisting experts were given adequate access when they visited the country this year. Pictured: Scientists work inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2017
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that one of the main challenges during the first phase of the investigation was that 'the raw data was not shared,' and urged China to 'be transparent, to be open and cooperate' on a second phase of the investigation
He also dismissed Tedros' claims that 'there was a premature push' to rule out the theory that the virus might have escaped from a Chinese government virology laboratory in Wuhan.
The expert team that had visited China 'agreed that the hypothesis that a lab leak led to the outbreak is extremely unlikely,' Zhao said, warning that 'this issue should not be politicized.'
Tedros had suggested that the virus could have leaked from a lab by 'accident'.
'I was a lab technician myself, I'm an immunologist, and I have worked in the lab, and lab accidents happen,' Dr Tedros said. 'It's common.'
Originally derided as a right-wing conspiracy theory - and vehemently rejected by Beijing - the idea that Covid-19 may have emerged from a lab leak has been gaining increasing momentum, particularly in the United States.
China has consistently blasted any suggestion that the lab leak could have been possible as politically motivated and unscientific.
The institute in Wuhan has come under increasing pressure amid the pandemic after claims emerged that the virus may have been manufactured in China
But Tedros emphasized on Thursday that more investigation was needed before the hypothesis could be definitively ruled out.
He said that 'checking what happened, especially in our labs, is important' to nailing down if the pandemic had any laboratory links.
'We need information, direct information on what the situation of this lab was before and at the start of the pandemic,' the WHO chief said, adding that China's co-operation was critical.
'If we get full information, we can exclude (the lab connection).'
His comments come after it emerged last month that Chinese scientists deleted crucial data from the earliest confirmed Covid patients.
Dozens of test samples from patients in epicentre Wuhan were found to have been wiped from an international database used to track the virus' evolution.
The files could have provided vital clues about how the virus originated and how long it had been spreading before the seafood market outbreak in December 2019.
Chinese scientists and officials have been keen to point the finger of blame outside their own borders - variously suggesting that the virus could have originated in Bangladesh, the US, Greece, Australia, India, Italy, Czech Republic, Russia or Serbia
The American professor who spotted their deletion and managed to recover some of the data said they suggested Covid was circulating long before China's official timeline.
He found the early samples of the virus were more evolved than would be expected of a pathogen that had recently jumped from animals to humans — but did not say it gave more weight to the 'lab leak' theory.
Professor Jesse Bloom, a virologist from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, said he believed China had removed the files to 'obscure their existence'.
British scientists told MailOnline the findings confirm Covid was spreading in people before being linked to wet markets, 'perhaps months before'.
In recent months, the idea that the pandemic started in a laboratory - and perhaps involved an engineered virus - has gained traction, especially with US President Joe Biden ordering a review of American intelligence to assess the possibility in May.
The move has given the investigation, previously considered a risible notion by the liberal media in the United States after it was promoted by his predecessor Donald Trump, new credence.
China has struck back aggressively, arguing that attempts to link the origins of Covid-19 to a lab were politically motivated and suggesting that the virus might have started abroad.
Multiple countries have uncovered evidence that the virus was circulating months earlier than originally thought. While Beijing has tried to insist this proves the virus originated elsewhere, most scientists still think China was the origin - raising the prospect that communist officials simply hid evidence of the early spread
At WHO's annual meeting of health ministers in the spring, China said that the future search for Covid-19's origins should continue - in other countries.
Most scientists suspect that the coronavirus originated in bats, but the exact route by which it first jumped into people - via an intermediary animal or in some other way - has not yet been determined.
It typically takes decades to narrow down the natural source of an animal virus like Ebola or Sars.
Last month, President Biden ordered agencies to 'redouble their efforts to collect and analyse information' and report back in 90 days.
According to Mr Biden, the intelligence services are currently split over the two possible sources for the virus that swept the planet over the past year, killing millions of people.
Mr Biden said that in March he asked for a report on the origins of the virus, including 'whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.'
The Huanan wet market, where scientists say the first cluster of infections were officially reported, is just a few hundred yards from the Wuhan Centres for Disease Prevention and Control and only a few miles from the the Wuhan Institute of Virology Lab, where scientists were reportedly conducting experiments on bats before the pandemic began.
President Biden ordered agencies to 'redouble their efforts to collect and analyse information' and report back in 90 days
The lab is one of only a handful in the world that is cleared to handle Class 4 pathogens — dangerous viruses that pose a high risk of person-to-person transmission.
Three researchers from the institute sought medical care in November 2019, before the virus began to spread, according to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal.
There are scientists who have claimed for more than a year that the genomic sequence of the virus is such that it must have been engineered by humans.
This follows revelations that a government laboratory in California concluded last May 2020 that COVID-19 may have escaped from a facility in Wuhan.
Scientists at the the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, near Berkeley, analyzed the genetic makeup of the virus to try to understand how it evolved.
They passed their May 27, 2020 findings on to the State Department in October. The five-month delay was not explained.
On January 15 the State Department published a fact sheet about COVID-19, which said that 'circumstantial' evidence suggested a lab leak theory was possible.
The secret document the California lab produced was not known about until Monday, when The Wall Street Journal reported on its existence.
People familiar with the Lawrence Livermore study said that it was prepared by their 'Z Division,' which is its intelligence arm.
The California lab has not confirmed the contents of their report, which remains secret.
And last month an explosive new study obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com suggested the scientists created Covid-19 and then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.
The paper's authors, British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen, wrote that they have had 'prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China' for a year - but were ignored by academics and major journals.
Dalgleish is a professor of oncology at St George's University, London, and is best known for his breakthrough creating the first working 'HIV vaccine', to treat diagnosed patients and allow them to go off medication for months.
Sørensen, a virologist, is chair of pharmaceutical company, Immunor, which developed a coronavirus vaccine candidate called Biovacc-19. Dalgleish also has share options in the firm.
The shocking allegations in the study include accusations of 'deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data' at Chinese labs, and it notes the silencing and disappearance of scientists in the communist country who spoke out.
The journal article, which has been submitted for publication, is set to make waves among the scientific community, as the majority of experts have until recently staunchly denied the origins of COVID-19 were anything other than a natural infection leaping from animals to humans.
Some experts still believe the virus was transmitted from a bat to some other species of animal, then to humans. However, its origins remain unproven.
The Wuhan lab was famed for conducting tests on bat coronaviruses, with experts who support the leak theory saying the same city being ground zero for the outbreak is too great a coincidence to ignore.
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