China 'denied WHO access' to initial covid-19 case data, says scientist
Dominic Dwyer, a microbiologist on the WHO team, says the mission received only a summary of the initial cases, but not the raw data it requested
China declined to provide complete data to the World Health Organization (WHO) team that went to the country to investigate the origins of the pandemic, according to an interview given by one of the members of the mission.
Microbiologist Dominic Dwyer told Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times that the WHO team asked for raw data on the country's first reported covid-19 cases, what he called "standard practice".
In response, Dwyer said, they only received a summary of the cases.
China has not responded to the accusation, but the country's government has said it has been transparent with the WHO. Last week, the WHO team presented the results of its investigative mission in China. Although the team has not been able to pinpoint the exact origin of the new coronavirus (and has not ruled out that it may be outside China), it said it was extremely unlikely that the virus would have left a Wuhan laboratory - thus rejecting a controversial theory of the conspiracy that emerged last year.
Wuhan is the first place in the world where the new coronavirus was detected, in late 2019. Since then, the world has accumulated more than 106 million cases and 2.3 million deaths by covid-19.
What the WHO requested from China
The WHO mission had asked China for raw data on the 174 identified cases of covid-19 in Wuhan in December 2019, Dwyer told Reuters.
Only half of these cases had been directly involved with the local food and animal market where the virus was initially detected.
"That's why we insist on asking for this (the data)," said Dwyer. He said that the request was made on "several occasions", but that only part of the data was provided, "but not necessarily enough to do the necessary analysis".
"Why that didn't happen, I can't comment. Whether it is (question) political, time or if it's difficult ... But if there are other reasons why this data is not available, I don't know. One can 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".
"Everyone knows how much pressure there is on China to open an investigation and also how much guilt can be associated with that," he said.
Dwyer said the restriction on access to data will be mentioned in the final WHO report, which is due to be released next week.
The WHO team landed in China in January, to spend four weeks there - the first two were inside a hotel in quarantine.
China's response
Beijing has insisted that it has been transparent with the WHO investigative mission, whose visit was authorized after months of negotiations. The mission experts were closely watched by Chinese officials.
The United States accused China of hiding the initial extent of the pandemic and criticized the terms of the WHO visit, which was not at liberty to travel or interview witnesses, as members of the Wuhan community. The justifications for the restrictions were health.
The investigators told the New York Times that the disagreements with the Chinese, including the restriction on patients' medical records, were so tense that they sometimes culminated in shouting.
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