Beijing: Chinese health officials attacked the World Health Organization on Saturday after its head said Beijing should have shared genetic information sooner while defending their efforts to find the COVID-19 virus's origin.

Shen Hongbing, director of the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, described the WHO comments as "offensive and disrespectful." He declared that the WHO was "trying to smear China" and warned against assisting others in "politicising COVID-19."

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the international organisation for health, stated on March 17 that recently made public genetic data collected in Wuhan, central China, where the first cases were discovered in late 2019, "should have been shared three years ago."

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We have always actively shared research findings with scientists from around the world because we are a responsible nation and because we are scientists, Shen said at a press conference. The origins of COVID-19 continue to be a contentious political point of contention.

Many researchers think it happened in a market in Wuhan, but the city is also home to laboratories, including China's top facility for virus collection. That led to theories that COVID-19 may have leaked from one. By creating doubt about the outbreak's origins, the government's Communist Party has attempted to deflect criticism of how it handled the outbreak.

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Anti-US conspiracy theories that the virus was created in Washington and smuggled into China have been repeated by officials. However, scientists from other countries do not find any evidence to support the government's claim that the virus may have entered China via mail or food shipments.

Chinese authorities hid information about the Wuhan outbreak in 2019 and punished a doctor for alerting the public to the emerging illness. In order to contain the disease, the ruling party changed course in early 2020 and banned access to major cities and the majority of international travel. The genetic material mentioned by the WHO's Tedros was procured in 2020 at a Wuhan market where wildlife was sold, but it was only recently uploaded to a global database.

Scientists claim that the samples reveal raccoon dogs' DNA mixed with the virus. That, according to them, strengthens the argument that COVID-19 originated in animals rather than a lab but does not answer the question of how it got there. They claim that raccoon dogs may also have contracted the virus from people.

After foreign scientists questioned the CDC about the data, Chinese officials removed it from the database, but a French expert had copied it and shared it with researchers outside of China. Chinese scientists, according to Zhou Lei, a CDC researcher who worked in Wuhan, "shared all the data we had" and "adhered to principles of openness, objectivity, and transparency."

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Researchers looked into the potential for a lab leak, according to Shen, and "fully shared our research and data without any concealment or reservation." Shen stated that the origin of COVID-19 has not yet been discovered, but he pointed out that it took years to identify the AIDS virus and that its source is still unknown.

"Some forces and figures who incite and participate in politicising the traceability issue and trying to discredit China should not assume that the world's scientific community will be blinded by their crude manipulation," Shen said.