China willing to continue working with intl community to find COVID origins

China is willing to continue to work with the international community to trace the origins of the COVID-19 as it has been doing over the past three years, a Chinese scientist said.

"Tracing the origin of the virus is not just for a single country and it can't be done by a single county alone. It inevitably requires the joint efforts of the global scientific community," Zhou Lei, a researcher from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told a news conference on Saturday.

"Therefore, it's imperative for the world to join forces, especially scientists, to trace the origin - which is a must and also is what we have been advocating," she said.

Recalling the studies of the origin of the virus in the past three years, she said: "We've been cooperating with the World Health Organization in an open, objective and scientific manner," she said.

"We've invited international professionals to China at least twice since 2020, to conduct research on tracing the virus origin."

She shared that China's expectation and efforts to trace the origins have never stopped after the first phase of the joint research, saying "a large number of research results and data carried out in our later period have been shared with international counterparts in various forms without reservation."

"We've published many scientific papers as well as uploaded sequences, data and information on multiple databases," she added.

While expecting future international cooperation, she called for the research to cover all possible countries and regions around the world in terms of the location and perspective of the traceability, rather than hyping up and focusing on Wuhan, where the first COVID-19 cases were reported in China.

"Tracing the virus origins should be an international movement," she said. "We hope that WHO, the authorized and global institution, can truly organize the international scientific community to conduct the work with a scientific, rigorous and fair attitude, so as to help the world find the proper answer."

She told media from home and abroad that they will continue to maintain close cooperation and contact with WHO, international counterparts and scientists around the world, "sharing the latest research results and data that we've obtained in a timely manner."