A senior Taiwanese public-health official said that the Covid-19 virus did not likely originate at the Wuhan wet market.
Taipei — A senior Taiwanese public-health official said that the Covid-19 virus did not likely originate at the Wuhan wet market, indicating that his government has all but ruled out that explanation of the virus’s origins.
“Our speculation is we think the Wuhan Huanan wet market is not the origin,” said Lo Yi-Chun, the deputy director general of Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control. “It’s probably just a very important step in the transmission chain. The origin is somewhere else.”
Lo added that while the wet market is not where the virus began, its true origin is still inconclusive and that the WHO is the best-placed organization to investigate this question.
“Maybe it’s still in Wuhan, for example, the laboratory, but we don’t have proof, solid evidence. The WHO has a better place to answer that question,” he said Monday, during a briefing organized for a group of reporters on a trip to Taiwan sponsored by the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The debate surrounding the virus’s origins has divided experts, as the Chinese Communist Party has sought to evade scrutiny of its conduct during the early days of the pandemic.
While public-health experts and others initially pushed the narrative that the Covid-19 virus began at a Wuhan wet market, an alternative theory favoring the possibility that it started as an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology later grew in prominence. In 2021, a group of prominent scientists signed a letter urging an investigation into the virus’s origins, including the possibility of a lab leak.
Up until now, a comprehensive investigation has been elusive. An intelligence-community investigation ordered by President Biden came back inconclusive, with various agencies split on the question.
And, for its part, Beijing has stonewalled a complete international accounting of the circumstances behind the virus’s origins. China responded to Australia’s support of an inquiry into the matter with punitive trade measures, while Chinese authorities restricted the activities of a WHO investigative team that went to Wuhan in 2021.
Lo’s comments show that Taipei’s view on a wet-market origin has solidified since former Taiwanese vice president Chen Chien-Jen said that it “may not be the origin of this infection” as the pandemic spread around the world in early 2020.
Taiwanese officials argue that their country’s lack of membership in the WHO cost millions of lives — since the international organization’s leadership ignored warnings from the Taiwanese government about potential human-to-human virus transmission.
The differences between the Chinese and Taiwanese approaches to dealing with the virus have been evident in Beijing’s widespread use of draconian lockdowns and Taiwan’s successful approach, Lo also said.
“People were never locked down at home. We were not like China. We didn’t lock them down in their houses. They were able to go to school. They were able to go to work. And most of our domestic economic activities continued.”
National Review is reporting from Taiwan on a trip organized and sponsored by the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.