China wants to broaden search for Covid origin
Cockpit voice recorder found
INDONESIAN navy divers have recovered the cockpit voice recorder of the Sriwijaya Air jet that crashed into the Java Sea in January this year, killing all 62 people on board.
Transportation minister Budi Karya Sumadi said divers retrieved the cockpit recorder on Tuesday, close to where the flight data recorder was recovered three days after the accident. If the voice recorder is undamaged, it might tell investigators what the pilots did to regain control of the plane during its brief flight.
CHINESE health officials are pushing to expand the search for the origins of coronavirus beyond China, a day after the release of a closely watched World Health Organisation (WHO) report.
They also rejected criticism that Beijing did not give enough data to a WHO team of international experts that visited Wuhan, the city where the first cases were detected, earlier this year.
The search for the origins of the virus has become a diplomatic feud. The United States and other Western nations have repeatedly raised questions about delays, transparency and data access, while China has promoted theories that suggest the virus may have come from elsewhere.
“If we limit the study of origin within China, I think this is a scientific misunderstanding, because the source is still unclear,” said Liang Wannian, the head of the Chinese team that worked with the WHO experts.
Mr Liang said the experts agreed that the place where the first case was identified is not necessarily where the virus emerged. “Based on this scientific consensus, we should have a broader viewpoint in terms of sourcing,” he added.
Experts agree that the virus could have come from elsewhere, with neighbouring countries in southeast Asia a prime possibility, but China’s insistence on broadening the research seems partly politically motivated in the face of Western criticism.
The WHO report concluded that the virus, or a progenitor of it, was most likely carried by a bat, which infected another animal that infected a human. Researchers have not been able to trace the bat or the intermediate animal, but suspicion has fallen on bat habitats in southwest China or nearby south-east Asia.
Bats carrying a virus similar to the one that causes Covid-19 have been found in China’s Yunnan province, but Chinese experts noted that such viruses have also been identified in south-east Asia. The same applies to the pangolin, another mammal that is considered a possible carrier.
“Therefore, we feel that it is necessary to conduct the study of virus source under a global framework,” said Tong Yigang, the animal and environment group leader on the Chinese team.
Mr Liang called accusations that China did not share data “invalid”. He said it is difficult to imagine the experts examining every sample and record, and that instead they used a database to perform analyses. “On this issue, what our Chinese experts can see is the same as what the foreign experts can see,” he added.
Dominic Dwyer, an Australian expert on the WHO team, said, although it can be argued they should have been allowed to visit Wuhan earlier, the team got “very good co-operation” from their Chinese colleagues. “Yes, there are more things that perhaps we might have been given,” he told the Australian broadcaster ABC. “But in general terms they gave us a lot of data that the world hasn’t seen before and we were able to analyse that.”
Japan’s government spokesman Katsunobu Kato echoed concerns expressed by the US government and others. “We are concerned that this investigation faced delays and the lack of access to virus samples,” he said, calling for a “prompt, independent and expert-led investigation that is free of surveillance”.