BEIJING — Chinese health officials defended their search for the source of the COVID-19 virus and lashed out Saturday at the World Health Organization after its leader said Beijing should have shared genetic information earlier.
The WHO comments were “offensive and disrespectful,” said the director of the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Shen Hongbing. He accused the WHO of “attempting to smear China” and said it should avoid helping others “politicize COVID-19.”
2004-5 年，当 H5 禽流感病毒株在亚洲蔓延时，中国实验室生产了几种未经授权的活禽流感疫苗，科罗拉多州立大学兽医学教授 Mo Salman 说，他曾在亚洲从事动物健康研究，提高 担心它们会产生危险的新变种。
The government has not said how widely used illicit vaccines are or who has produced them. But a “vast amount” of pigs in China have nonetheless been vaccinated, Johnson said, a sentiment echoed by many other experts.
In 2004-5, when the H5 bird flu strains were spreading across Asia, Chinese laboratories produced several unauthorized live bird flu vaccines, said Mo Salman, a professor of veterinary medicine at Colorado State University, who has worked on animal health in Asia, raising fears that they could produce dangerous new variants.
“The current ASF unlawful vaccine(s) in China is repeating history,” Salman said.
Beijing: ‘Worst sandstorm in a decade’ leaves Chinese capital covered in thick brown dust after heavy Gobi Desert winds
Monday 15 March 2021 07:11, UK
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https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.568.1_en.html#goog_1728580444Play Video – Beijing choked in dust stormBeijing faces regular sandstorms due to its proximity to the Gobi desert, and issues such as deforestation and soil erosion.
China’s hesitancy to join the UN project involving other Asian nations may compound frustration by global researchers who have been pressing Beijing to share information about the origins of COVID-19, as they seek to prevent future pandemics due to zoonotic, or animal-to-human, disease transmission.
Four Asian countries – China, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos – were initially selected for the survey by the scientific advisory committee of the project, called the Safety across Asia For the global Environment (SAFE), because they host multiple facilities presenting risks of animal-to-human disease transmission, the UN official said.
People battle wind and sand in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, on Monday, as sandstorms hit many places in northern China including Beijing. ZHANG SHU/FOR CHINA DAILY
The air quality in Beijing at one point reached the worst level on the country’s six-tier scale for the second day on Tuesday, as yellow dust blanketed the capital.
People were seen wearing masks, and cars were covered with dust.
A woman in her 40s said she has been unable to open the window or go out. She added that the yellow dust has become worse than before.
A man in his 30s said driving has been difficult, and the situation is serious.
A 56-year-old woman in southern China has died after testing positive for H3N8 avian influenza, marking the first human death from that strain of bird flu, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
While H3N8 is “one of the most frequently found” subtypes of flu in birds, it had not been detected in humans before two cases emerged in April and May last year, both in China.
Shen Hongbing, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks at a press conference on the origins of COVID-19 at the State Council Information Office in Beijing, Saturday, April 8, 2023. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Chinese officials have previously pushed back on this type of theory, saying that the coronavirus was brought in by sick people rather by animals.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said in March the COVID-19 pandemic was likely caused by a lab leak in Wuhan, China.
“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray told Fox News in an interview that aired Tuesday. “Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”
“I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we’re doing, the work that our U.S. government and close foreign partners are doing. And that’s unfortunate for everybody,” Wray added.
The World Health Organization said Thursday that it was sure China had far more data that could shed light on the origins of COVID-19, demanding that Beijing immediately share all relevant information.
“Without full access to the information that China has … all hypotheses are on the table,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva.
“That’s why we have been asking China to be cooperative on this,” he said, insisting that if Beijing does provide the missing data, “we will know what happened or how it started.”
More than three years after COVID-19 surfaced, heated debate still rages around the origins of the pandemic.
FILE – WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove — pictured at WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, on July 3, 2020 — said on Thursday that scientists and others need to share what they know about COVID-19. “This is not a game,” she said.
This is not the first time Van Kerkhove has been vocal about China’s lack of transparency about Covid, nor is she the only world leader to call on China to be forthcoming about the beginnings of the pandemic.
In March, Van Kerkhove described to Science WHO’s late discovery of the Chinese data about the market as “beyond infuriating,” calling the lack of collaboration “scary as hell.”
Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a member of President Joe Biden’s Covid task force during the presidential transition, said Van Kerkhove’s editorial puts WHO on the record on the issue.
“Will that be a compelling incentive for China to share more? No. They’re going to do what they’re going to do,” Osterholm said.
COVID-19 origins hearing witness blasts China’s ‘stonewalling’ China has vigorously denied COVID-19 lab-leak origins theory and refused to be transparent with international investigators
“Since the early days of the pandemic, China’s government has destroyed samples, hidden records, imprisoned brave Chinese journalists, gagged Chinese scientists, actively spread misinformation and done pretty much everything possible to prevent the kind of unfettered, evidence based investigation that is so urgently required,” he charged.
“Every person on earth must demand accountability from China, calling for a full investigation of pandemic origin,” Metzl continued, adding that scrutiny on China does not mean the U.S. and others should neglect to scrutinize their own response to the pandemic.
A worker in a protective suit sprays disinfectant as residents stand in line for their routine Covid-19 tests at a coronavirus testing site in Beijing on Thursday, November 24, 2022. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/02/economy/china-zero-covid-sustainability-debt-woes-intl-hnk/index.html
Most of the debts incurred by Chinese local governments aimed to fund the strict lockdowns, mass testing and quarantine centers, which were the hallmarks of the controversial zero-COVID policy. As the debt and its interests continue to pile up and mature, Chinese local governments are forced to cut their spending or delay investments, impeding economic growth and public services. In Zhengzhou, where the world’s biggest iPhone factory stands, the city’s fiscal revenue dropped by an average of 14% per year while its total debt grew by 14%. Its debt-to-fiscal income ratio surged 178% in 2022, compared with 75% in 2019. The Chinese city’s public services spending is feeling the brunt of the growing debt. Zhengzhou’s bus drivers said their salaries were cut in 2021, while street sweepers continue to work despite not being paid for their services in months.
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/230130182527-hegang-city-2020-exlarge-169.jpg The northern coal city of Hegang covered in snow on January 2, 2020.
Local governments have exhausted their budgets after spending enormous amounts of money on enforcing frequent Covid lockdowns, mass testing and setting up quarantine centers before December’s policy U-turn, which signaled the abrupt end of Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy.
“Beijing is facing an economic minefield of its own making,” said Craig Singleton, senior fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. “All told, China’s current debt crisis represents a perfect storm.”
The “hidden debt” issued by local government financial vehicles, entities created to circumvent borrowing restrictions and used to channel funding for infrastructure spending, might have totaled 65 trillion yuan ($9.6 trillion) by the middle of 2022, according to a recent estimate by analysts at Mars Macro, an economic research firm based in Hunan. That’s more than 20% higher than the estimate of 53 trillion yuan made by Goldman Sachs in 2021. That would be equivalent to more than half of China’s GDP. Overall, Chinese government debt is now equivalent to 102% of its GDP, the analysts estimated.
The Wujiang Bridge in the city of Zunyi in the southwest province of Guizhou on Nov. 24, 2021. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/31/economy/china-local-governments-basic-services-debt-crisis-intl-hnk/index.html
中国男子被指拒绝进入隔离设施后被拖出家门 Chinese Man dragged out of home after allegedly refusing to go to quarantine facility
在2020年初，当新冠肺炎仍然是一种神秘疾病时，中国疾病控制中心（CDC）从市场采集了样本。这些样本中包含的遗传信息直到最近才被简短地公开，这使一组研究人员能够解码它们，并将浣熊狗作为可能的“中间宿主”，疾病从中蔓延到人身上。根据3月20日在线发布的一项分析，这项分析的关键是，正在出售的野生哺乳动物浣熊狗的DNA生活在肉类市场上，与SARS CoV-2检测呈阳性的拭子在同一个位置被发现。—阅读www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65067264 During the early days of 2020, when Covid was still a mystery disease, the Chinese Centers for Disease Control (CDC) took samples from the market. The genetic information contained in those samples has only recently been made, briefly, public, and that enabled a team of researchers to decode them and point to racoon dogs as a possible “intermediate host” from which the disease spilled over into people. The crux of this analysis is that DNA from racoon dogs, wild mammals that were being sold live in the market for meat, was found in the same locations as swabs from the market that tested positive for SARS CoV-2, according to an analysis that was published online on 20 March. — Read on www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65067264
Does this answer the question of how the pandemic started?
This is not definitive proof. That is something we might never have.
The search for that proof has itself become heavily politicised and often toxic. While this lends weight to the theory that the virus emerged in wild animals and spread to humans at the market, another theory has focused on a possible “lab leak” of a virus from Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The years-long delay in releasing this valuable data has led to frustration and anger with the China CDC.
“The data are three years old – it’s an absolute scandal that it’s taken this long for it to see the light of day,” said Prof Holmes.
The information had actually been posted onto the GISAID genetic database back in February 2022. But it was left there unnoticed. It’s assumed that this was done to provide supporting evidence for a research paper based on the data that was being prepared by Chinese researchers from the CDC. (Sharing such background data is considered a requirement for scientific publication.)
But shortly after the Chinese researchers learned that others had seen the information, it became hidden again.
In a press conference on 17 March, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) said that “every piece of data” was important in moving us closer to that answer. “And every piece of data relating to studying the origins of Covid-19 needs to be shared with the international community immediately.”
Even three days’ notice would have been good,” said a former China CDC official. “The way this happened was just unbelievable.”
Soon, the sick overran emergency wards and patients sprawled on floors. COVID-19 antivirals sold for thousands of dollars a box on the black market.
In just six weeks, about 80% of the country was infected — more than a billion people, the China CDC later estimated. But even as deaths mounted, authorities ordered state media to deflect criticism over China’s sudden reopening, according to a leaked directive obtained by a former state media journalist and posted online.
The WHO, on Friday (Local time) also asked the Chinese official about the reasons behind not revealing the data three years ago and why, after it was published online in January, it could not be found now.
Before the data got vanished into the internet space, an international team of virus experts downloaded and began analysing the research. The team revealed that the data supports the idea that the pandemic could have begun from the illegally traded raccoon dogs, which infected the humans at China’s Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
But the team couldn’t reach the final result as the gene sequences were removed from a scientific database once the experts offered to collaborate on the analysis with their Chinese counterparts, according to The New York Times.
“These data could have — and should have — been shared three years ago,” Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director general, said. The missing evidence now “needs to be shared with the international community immediately,” he said.
过去一周，中国流感疫情的爆发加剧，因为一个大城市准备实施疫情式的封锁，以遏制疫情激增 An influenza outbreak in China picked up intensity over the past week as a major city prepared to enforce pandemic-style lockdowns to curb the surge in
— Read on americanmilitarynews.com/2023/03/china-flu-outbreak-intensifies-as-infection-rises-for-sixth-week/
THE EARLY phase of the coronavirus outbreak in China remains an important and still poorly understood lacuna. Prompt, early action could have saved lives and averted enormous disruption. Instead, the Chinese people were exposed to danger in the first weeks of the epidemic when their officials failed to sound the alarm, even though they knew something was afoot.
即将上任的总理是习近平的亲密盟友，在后者担任中国东部浙江省省委书记期间担任了三年的幕僚长。 虽然人们预计他会担任这一职务，但几个月前，在他处理上海封锁导致居民无法获得足够的食物和药品后，他的晋升似乎受到质疑。The incoming premier is a close ally of Xi, serving as his chief of staff for three years when the latter was the provincial party secretary of eastern China’s Zhejiang province. While he has been expected to come into this role, Li’s ascension seemed in doubt a few months ago after his handling of the Shanghai lockdown which left residents without adequate access to food and medicines.
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