8 Apr. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC-China) have rejected the latest accusation by the World Health Organization (WHO) about an alleged lack of transparency regarding the delivery of information on the origin of the coronavirus and have accused a once again to the UN agency to act in the service of political interests against Beijing.
The criticism of the WHO has come in the form of an editorial by its chief technical officer, Maria Van Kerkhove, in which she described as “inexcusable” that a group of international scientists last month found data recently collected by Chinese colleagues on the genetic basis. international GISAID on possible contaminating agents in the Wuhan market, the epicenter of the disease; information that the WHO has been asking China for three years.
In response, CDC-China researcher Zhou Lei on Saturday declared her dismay at the accusations and defended her team’s actions. “I am really surprised that WHO officials have accused China of a lack of transparency,” she said at a press conference collected by the ‘Global Times’.
“We have conducted in-depth joint research analyses, the results of which have been collectively endorsed by the WHO and our own experts,” he added.
The director of the centers himself, Shen Hongbing, has also assured that China provided all the relevant information between 2020 and 2021, and that Van Kerkhove’s accusations are a “vulgar offense to the scientists who worked on the initial tracking effort.”
“We urge certain people in the WHO to return to the position of science and impartiality, instead of becoming a tool to politicize the origin of the coronavirus by any country, either voluntarily or forced,” he said. Shen added during the CDC press conference, this time picked up by Bloomberg.
