The World Health Organization on Friday called on China to release new data linking the Covid pandemic's origins to animal samples at Wuhan Market after the country recently took down the research.
The agency said China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention uploaded data to the public virus tracking database GISAID in late January relating to samples taken at the Huanan market in Wuhan in 2020.
Researchers from several countries downloaded and analyzed the data before it was removed, and presented their findings to the WHO last weekend. The researchers found molecular evidence that raccoon dogs and other animals susceptible to Covid were sold at the market, which is consistent with hypotheses about the virus spilling into humans from a wild animal.
The new data doesn't provide a conclusive answer to how the pandemic began, "but it does provide more clues" about a potential host of the virus that spread it to humans, said Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's Covid-19 technical lead. She called on China to publicly release the data so the WHO and other researchers can further analyze it and inch closer to understanding the origins of a pandemic that has killed millions of people worldwide.