China Rejects WHO’s 2nd Covid Probe

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What has happened?

China rejects the World Health Organization’s proposal for a second phase of investigation into Covid-19’s origins, including a potential laboratory leak, and
Has put forward its own proposal to seek evidence in other countries, a top Chinese official said.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus presented member states last week with a plan for further study that would include-
Audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the first cases were identified.
He also called for greater transparency from Beijing.

Zeng Yixin, deputy health minister, said this showed “disrespect for common sense and arrogance toward science“.
Zeng said he was shocked by the proposal, “We cannot accept this kind of plan for origin-tracing.“
Instead, he said Beijing had on July 4 submitted to the WHO its own proposal for a second phase, which he said should be based on the first phase that was conducted by a WHO-led team and their Chinese counterparts early this year.
Zeng noted that members of the WHO-led team who visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology earlier this year as part of an investigative trip already concluded that it was extremely unlikely that the virus leaked from there.
Zeng said scientists should look for evidence of animal hosts as well as early cases in other countries, both of which would entail laborious planning and lengthy timelines.

Investigators were able to visit Wuhan – the city where the virus was first detected in December 2019 – in January of this year.
When the WHO-led team visited, it faced constraints and had little power to conduct thorough, impartial research without the blessing of China’s government.
Chinese authorities have since declined to provide the WHO with raw data on confirmed and potential early Covid-19 cases.
But earlier this month, WHO head Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus outlined the terms of the inquiry’s next phase.
This included looking at certain science research institutions.
He has now called on China to be more co-operative about the early stages of the outbreak.
He urged Beijing to “be transparent, to be open and co-operate“ with investigators and provide raw patient data that had not been shared during the first probe.

China’s rejection of the WHO’s proposal presents a stumbling block in a painstaking global effort to find the origin of Covid-19, which has caused more than four million deaths around the world.
Beijing is sensitive to other countries blaming it for the pandemic, and rising mistrust between the U.S. and China has compounded the difficulty of scientific collaboration and consensus.

Beijing rejects that theory vehemently and has pushed its own claim—without providing evidence—that Covid-19 might have come from a U.S. military laboratory.
China’s foreign ministry has been more hawkish, pressing for a probe into the military laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md.,
Which is home to important parts of the U.S. biological-defense program and other medical-research efforts conducted by the military.
The White House has said there are no technically credible reasons for such a probe.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is a high-security research facility that studies pathogens in nature with the potential to infect humans with deadly and exotic new diseases.
The lab has done extensive work on bat-borne viruses since the 2002 SARS-CoV-1 international outbreak, which began in China.

The institute collects genetic material from wildlife for experimentation at its Wuhan lab.
Researchers experiment with live viruses in animals to gauge human susceptibility.
To reduce the risk of pathogens escaping accidentally, the facility is supposed to enforce rigorous safety protocols, such as protective garb and super air filtration.
But even the strictest measures cannot eliminate such risks.

To some scientists, the release of a dangerous pathogen via a careless lab worker is a plausible hypothesis for how the pandemic started and warrants investigation.
The Wuhan lab is not far from the Huanan Seafood Market, which early in the health crisis was cited as the most likely place where animal-to-human transmission of the virus may have taken place.
The market was also the site of the first known COVID-19 superspreader event.

Their proximity raised immediate suspicions, fueled by the failure so far to identify any wildlife infected with the same viral lineage and
Compounded by the Chinese government’s refusal to allow the lab-leak scenario to be fully investigated.

A U.S. State Department fact sheet, released before the WHO mission in the waning days of the Trump Administration, alleged, without proof,
That several WIV researchers had fallen sick with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 or common seasonal illnesses before the first publicly confirmed case in December 2019.

A study published last month suggested a Wuhan market was the site of widespread trading in illegal caged wildlife, providing evidence that the virus could have spread naturally from market animals to humans.
But some members of the WHO-led team and other scientists say closures of operations that supplied wildlife to the market make it potentially impossible to establish whether the virus spread from another species.
The Chinese panel said Thursday that while the coronaviruses in bats and pangolins are most closely related to Covid-19,
Chinese experts believe the difference was still too wide to prove they are direct ancestors.

Q) The non-living characteristic of viruses is?