It has been revealed that a scientific body in China applied for a commercial patent for Remdesivir, a potential coronavirus treatment, in January, sparking further concerns that the country concealed knowledge about COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic.

On January 21, China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the country’s Military Medicine Institute filed a patent for the commercial use of Remdesivir, a drug developed by US pharmaceutical giant Gilead to treat Ebola, which is currently undergoing clinical trials to determine whether it could work as a COVID-19 treatment.

The patent application came just one day after Beijing confirmed that COVID-19 is transmissible between humans. The speed with which the Wuhan Institute of Virology moved to patent Remdesivir has reinforced suspicions that Chinese authorities may have had a better understanding of the gravity of the pending public health crisis at this early stage than they disclosed to global bodies.

It has been suggested that political leaders in China suppressed data about the coronavirus outbreak, prevented public health teams from investigating the epidemic and delayed warning international bodies about the gravity of the disease and its capacity to transmit between humans.

UK MP Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative Party member of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, has called for a full, independent inquiry into the way in which the outbreak was managed in China.

On Sunday, Mr Tugendhat said: ‘It is quite clear there is an awful lot that we don’t know about the emergence of the disease and the responses to it. We all need to learn the lessons of the outbreak so the international community can respond better in the future.’

In recent weeks, scepticism about data shared by China with international bodies increased as authorities in Wuhan revised the city’s coronavirus death toll upwards by 50%.

A local government task force in Wuhan registered a further 1,290 COVID-19 deaths, bringing the city’s death toll to 3,869 from the previously recorded figure of 2,579.

Refuting accusations of suppressed data or cover-ups, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijan told a news briefing in Beijing: ‘Medical workers at some facilities might have been preoccupied with saving lives and there existed delayed reporting, underreporting or misreporting, but there has never been any cover-up and we do not allow cover-ups’.

On January 20, Chinese President Xi Jingping confirmed the contagious nature of COVID-19, but leaked documents have indicated that authorities in China may have realised the severity of the threat posed by the outbreak for six days before any such knowledge was made public.

A patent for the commercial use of Remdesivir was filed on January 21 in a move that has been described as ‘provocative’ by clinical research site Trial Site News.

Gilead maintains that it applied for the right to use Remdesivir to treat coronavirus four years ago, and clinical trials are currently underway to test the efficacy of the drug against COVID-19.