“There is a scientific and moral dimension to this problem and we must keep pushing until we have the answer.“on the origins of the pandemic which started in China at the end of 2019, declared Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, during the weekly press briefing of the organization he leads in Geneva.
He pointed out that he had recently sent an official email to a senior Chinese official again asking for Beijing’s collaboration in trying to find where and when the Covid-19 virus started to spread until it became the worst pandemic in a century, killing millions of people and incapacitating tens of millions more.
An article in the scientific journal Nature published this week claimed that the WHO had given up pursuing the second phase of the origins investigation because of the lack of cooperation from the Chinese authorities.
“Quietly Suspended”
“The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly suspended the second phase of its long-awaited scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges with attempts to conduct crucial studies in China.“, writes Nature.
Quoted in the article, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, who has been in charge of the fight against the pandemic at the WHO since its inception, affirmed that this information was erroneous and the result of “an error in the way of reporting information”.
“The WHO has not abandoned the study of the origin of Covid“, she affirmed during the press conference; and to insist: “We haven’t given up on any plan. We won’t stop until we understand the origins… and it gets harder and harder because the more time passes, the harder it is to really understand what happened in these early stages of the pandemic“.
“We continue to ask for more cooperation and collaboration from our colleagues in China, to advance the studies that must take place in China.“, she added.
Market or laboratory?
A team of specialists from various disciplines under the leadership of the WHO accompanied by Chinese colleagues had spent two weeks in China in February 2020 to try to unravel the mystery of the origins in Wuhan, on the places where the pandemic seems to have started.
A joint report then tipped the scales in favor of transmission to humans of the highly contagious virus by an intermediate animal, perhaps in a market in the Chinese city.
Another theory – championed in particular by US intelligence services under the Trump administration but also a number of members of the scientific community – leaned in favor of a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan, where SARS-like coronaviruses CoV-2 were studied.
As of February 14, the WHO dashboard, which counts the victims of Covid-19, showed 6,841,152 officially recorded deaths and 756,135,075 confirmed cases. In the organization’s own opinion, the actual figures are much higher.