China ‘refused to give data’ to WHO team

China refused to hand over key data to the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of Covid-19, one of its members has said.

Microbiologist Dominic Dwyer told Reuters, the Wall St Journal and the New York Times the team requested raw patient data from early cases, what he called “standard practice”,

He said they only received a summary.

China has not responded to the allegation but has previously insisted it was transparent with the WHO.

The US has urged China to make available data from the earliest stages of the outbreak, saying it has “deep concerns” about the WHO report.

Last week, the WHO team concluded it was “extremely unlikely” that the coronavirus leaked from a lab in the city of Wuhan, dismissing a controversial theory that emerged last year.

Wuhan was the first place in the world where the virus was detected, in late 2019. Since then, more than 106 million cases and 2.3 million deaths have been reported worldwide.

The investigators had asked for raw data on the 174 identified cases of Covid-19 from Wuhan in December 2019, Professor Dwyer told Reuters.

Only half of the early cases had been exposed to the seafood market where the virus was initially detected.

“That’s why we’ve persisted to ask for that,” Prof Dwyer said. “Why that doesn’t happen, I couldn’t comment. Whether it’s political or time or it’s difficult… But whether there are any other reasons why the data isn’t available, I don’t know. One would only speculate.”

Thea Kolsen Fischer, a Danish immunologist who was also part of the WHO team, told the New York Times that she saw the investigation as “highly geopolitical”.

“Everybody knows how much pressure there is on China to be open to an investigation and also how much blame there might be associated with this,” she said.