BEIJING—The Chinese government declined to supply World Health Organization investigators with personalized, raw data on early Covid-19 cases that could help them investigate the time and origin of the coronavirus, which started and escalated in China.
The Chinese authorities refused to give data to the team investigators of WHO on the 174 cases of Covid-19 identified from the early stages of the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019.
The WHO team says the Chinese authorities did not allow them to view the raw underlying data of the Chinese officials and scientists who gave their own extensive summaries and analysis of data on the cases. The WHO team said, “They also supplied aggregated data and analysis on retrospective searches through medical records in the months before the Wuhan outbreak was identified, saying that they had found no evidence of the virus.”
Dominic Dwyer, an Australian microbiologist on the WHO team said, “They showed us a couple of examples, but that’s not the same as doing all of them, which is a standard epidemiological investigation.” He also said, “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.”
The question arises as to why is China hiding its data.