The Covid-19 pandemic in FranceDossierAccording to the Wall Street Journal, a Chinese researcher sent her country's authorities an almost complete sequence of the virus on December 28, 2019. But Beijing only informed the WHO on January 11th.
Further evidence, if any, of the Chinese authorities' lack of transparency regarding the pandemic. According to the Wall Street Journal, which obtained documents obtained from the Department of Health by an American parliamentary committee, Beijing wasted valuable time early in the pandemic by not sharing certain information about Covid-19.
A Chinese researcher reportedly downloaded “a nearly complete sequence of the virus’s structure into a database maintained by the U.S. government” on December 28, 2019, at a time when the government was still publicly speaking of a “viral pneumonia of unknown cause.” “. It was only on January 11, two more weeks, that the Chinese authorities communicated to the WHO the sequencing of the virus. The latter does not entirely match that of the Chinese researcher, but would be very close.
For the Wall Street Journal, based on the testimony of specialists, “these two additional weeks could have proven crucial in helping the international medical community figure out how Covid-19 spreads, develop medical defenses and deal with the Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, wrote on the GitHub platform that “the immediate release of the sequence accelerates the development of the Covid-19 vaccines, which are used in the United States by the thousands every week “Saving lives could have been accelerated by several weeks.” alone. UNITED STATES”.
Questions still remain about the origins of the virus
If the researcher contacted by the American daily did not respond, the Chinese Embassy in the United States, for its part, stated through its spokesman that their country “has continued to refine its response to Covid based on scientific data.” to make it more targeted” and that “China’s Covid response policy is based on science, effective and consistent with national realities.”
If this information “does not resolve the debate over whether Covid arose from an infected animal or a laboratory leak,” the paper says, “it suggests that the world still does not have a complete explanation for the origins of the pandemic ” For Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican-elect to the House of Representatives, this discovery proves that the United States “cannot trust any of the so-called 'facts' or data provided by the Chinese Communist Party.”