I am very disappointed that they were not able to access more data and were able to conduct a proper investigation. What they did they did, but they need to do a lot more than that, says Magnus Evander, professor of virology at Umeå University.
Researchers in Australia, France, Spain, Austria and the USA are criticizing, among other things, for not testing blood from blood banks to see if the virus was circulating in the population before the discovery of the then-unknown respiratory disease. In a patient on December 8, 2019 in Wuhan, China, the disease was later called covid-19.
They also indicated that in order to be able to write off the spread of the virus from the security laboratory in Wuhan, where they worked with the Coronavirus, sequencing of the Coronaviruses they worked with and blood tests with the antibody levels of the employees before the outbreak is reported. Thomas Bergstrom, professor of clinical microbiology at the Sahlgrenska Academy in Gothenburg, agrees with this criticism.
– It cannot be swept under the carpet. It’s a very big event with Covid-19 and there are a lot of question marks about the initial stage, and then there are many researchers who are asking these questions now and wanting to present the data, he says.
Professor of Epidemiology Theia Fischer at the University of Copenhagen is a participant on the World Health Organization’s international team. She responded via email to Vetenskapsradion that she did not understand the criticism, as the report describes that the team met with the head of the blood bank in Wuhan and subsequently requested a study from the blood bank.
More Stories
The contribution of virtual reality to research in medicine and health
The sun could hit the Internet on Earth
In memory of Jens Jørgen Jørgensen