summary - Contemporaneous news report, sourced to WHO mission member Dominic Dwyer, that Chinese authorities gave the joint WHO-China team only summary statistics — not the raw, case-level “line listings” (exposure history, symptom-onset dates, and how case-defining criteria were applied to each patient) — for the 174 earliest identified COVID-19 cases from December 2019, despite the team’s request. Only about half of those 174 cases had a known link to the Huanan market, which is exactly why the withheld raw data mattered for judging how market-centric the true earliest-case pattern was. Other team members reportedly characterized the exchange as less adversarial than a “refusal.”
relevance_note - Direct, named-participant documentation of exactly which early-case data was and was not released to international investigators — the concrete data-suppression finding scope note 2 asks this slice to establish; also the practical reason later case-geolocation datasets (e.g. Worobey 2022) had to be assembled from indirect/leaked/court-obtained fragments rather than an official raw line list.