Kyodo News:

Regarding the investigation and research into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, what are China's plans for future cooperation with the international community? Are there any specific arrangements or plans in place for international cooperation? Thank you.

Zhou Lei:

Thank you for your questions. That is actually our aspiration as well. Just now, I have repeatedly mentioned that tracing the origins of SARS-CoV-2 is not an issue for just one country and cannot be accomplished by one country alone. It necessarily requires the joint efforts of the global scientific community. Therefore, it is imperative that the international community, especially scientists, work together to carry out origin tracing. That is what must be done and what we have consistently advocated. We have cooperated with the WHO in a transparent, objective, science-based, and open manner. Additionally, we have invited international experts many times. For example, since 2020, we have invited international experts to China to study the origins of SARS-CoV-2 at least twice. I believe this approach will remain unchanged in the future. That is for sure.

Just now, my colleagues have repeatedly mentioned that during the first phase of our joint studies, we collaborated with 10 international peers and top experts to carry out research together. We developed a detailed joint research report and released it together, which in itself demonstrates our attitude and our research achievements. After that, we didn't stop our origin tracing research; our expectations and efforts never ceased. We shared with our international peers a great number of research results and data from our later studies. We published many papers and shared genetic sequences of coronaviruses, our data and information on multiple databases. In addition, we supported the WHO's decision to conduct joint global origin tracing and sent experts to collect more data and materials. We have continuously done all the work that we can do. In fact, we hope that global origin tracing can truly become an international effort. We have often called for expanding the scope of origin tracing research to cover all possible countries and regions, rather than always sensationalizing and focusing on Wuhan. We have done a lot of work in this regard. I have repeatedly reiterated that China's attitude remains unchanged: Origin tracing research should be an international endeavor. We also hope that the WHO, as an authoritative professional international institution, can truly organize global origin tracing and unite all elites from the international scientific community with a science-based, rigorous, and impartial attitude. In doing so, we can discover a convincing answer to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 in the future. Thank you.