The Chinese Communist Party refused to provide World Health Organization investigators with data on early Covid-19 cases essential to determining how and when the virus began spreading.
“The Chinese authorities turned down requests to provide such data on 174 cases of Covid-19 that they have identified from the early phase of the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019,” The Wall Street Journal reports.
Instead, Chinese Communist Party officials and scientists provided World Health Organization (WHO) summaries and analysis of data on the cases.
“But the WHO team wasn’t allowed to view the raw underlying data on those retrospective studies, which could allow them to conduct their own analysis on how early and how extensively the virus began to spread in China, the team members said. Member states typically provide such data—anonymized, but disaggregated so investigators can see all other relevant details on each case—as part of WHO investigations, said team members,” The Wall Street Journal added.
“They showed us a couple of examples, but that’s not the same as doing all of them, which is standard epidemiological investigation,” said Dominic Dwyer, a microbiologist on the WHO team. “So then, you know, the interpretation of that data becomes more limited from our point of view, although the other side might see it as being quite good.”
