The head of the World Health Organization made a personal pledge on Wednesday to do everything possible to get “an answer” about the origins of Covid-19, firmly denying reports that the organization has given up on its investigation.
“There is a scientific and moral dimension to this problem and we must keep pressing until we have the answer” about the origins of the pandemic that began in China at the end of 2019, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared during a meeting with the press. instructions.
“It’s very, very important and very, very crucial,” he insisted.
He noted that he had recently sent an official letter to a senior Chinese official to again request Beijing’s collaboration in finding the origins of the worst pandemic in a century, which has killed millions of people and disabled tens of millions more.
“Suspended in silence”
An article from the scientific journal Nature published this week claimed that the WHO had given up on continuing with the second phase of the origins investigation due to the lack of cooperation from the Chinese authorities.
The scientific community believes that it is crucial to know the origins of this pandemic in order to better combat or even prevent the next one.
“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,” Nature writes. .
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, denied it.
“The WHO has not abandoned the study of the origin of Covid,” he said during the press conference; and insist: “We have not abandoned any plan. We are not going to stop until we understand the origins and it becomes increasingly difficult because the more time passes, the more difficult it is to really understand what happened in those first stages of the pandemic.”
“We continue to ask for more cooperation and collaboration from our colleagues in China, to advance the studies that must be carried out in China,” he added. “We will go where the science takes us,” she promised, without political considerations.
In the article, she is specifically quoted as saying that “there is no phase two”, but the editor accuses the author of the Nature article of being wrong, “which is really worrying because it leads to inaccurate headlines”.
Venue yet to be determined
A team of specialists under the direction of the WHO and accompanied by Chinese colleagues had investigated in China at the beginning of 2021 to try to unravel the mystery of the origins in Wuhan, about the places where the pandemic seems to have started.
A joint report then tipped the balance in favor of transmission of the highly contagious virus to humans by an intermediate animal, perhaps in a market in the Chinese city.
Another theory, defended in particular by the US intelligence services under the Trump administration, but also by various members of the scientific community, favors a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan, where the CoV coronaviruses were studied. -2 similar to SARS.
Dr. Michael Ryan, WHO’s head of emergency situations, repeated that “all hypotheses remain on the table” until the mystery is resolved.
No equipment was allowed to return to China and WHO officials repeatedly requested additional data, which until then had always been denied.
The WHO also created the Scientific Advisory Group on the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) in October 2021. Its mission goes far beyond the framework of the only research on the origins of Covid-19 and must, above all, establish a catalog of good practices that allows better and faster detection of the vector of the next pandemic.
As for Dr. Ryan – clearly tired of the criticism against his organization – he recalled that the main responsibility for finding the origins of a pandemic “was in the hands of the State” where it started.
Source: BFM TV
