WHO refutes claim that “new coronavirus was not first seen in China”

The World Health Organization’s chief emergency specialist Ryan on November 27 politely dismissed the notion that the new coronavirus did not first appear in China.

According to Reuters, Ryan told an online conference that it would be “highly speculative” for the WHO to say that the new coronavirus did not first appear in China. It has been widely reported in the news that the new coronavirus was first discovered in China in December of last year. Ryan points out that the investigation should start where the first human cases appeared.

Separately, according to the pro-Beijing overseas Chinese language media outlet DoviNews.com, a research team led by Shen Libing of the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, published a paper on Nov. 17 in the British medical journal The Lancet Preprint Platform, indicating that the new coronavirus may have first appeared in India or Bangladesh.

In their paper, they conclude that Wuhan is not the first place where human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus has occurred.

However, researchers in the United Kingdom, India, and the United States have questioned the conclusions of the paper, arguing that there has been research bias and misinterpretation.