The WHO on Friday urged all countries, including the United States, to share information regarding the origins of COVID, following the FBI and the US Department of Energy ruled that a lab leak caused the outbreak. pandemic.
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“If a country has information on the origins of the pandemic, it is essential that this information is shared with the WHO and the international scientific community,” said World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom. Ghebreyesus, during his regular press conference.
This is not regarding “pointing blame”, he said, but regarding “advancing our understanding of how this pandemic began”.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray this week said a lab accident in China’s Wuhan is “very likely” to be the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic, two days following a similar hypothesis was put forward. by the US Department of Energy.
AFP
Maria Van Kerkhove, head of COVID response at the WHO, told reporters that the agency asked Americans to share information from the Department of Energy, but also from other agencies.
“At this time, we do not have access to these reports or to the data that made it possible to draw up these reports,” she acknowledged.
The scientific community believes that it is crucial to know the origins of this scourge in order to be able to fight it better or even avoid a future pandemic.
But it is also divided between the proponents of the hypothesis of transmission by intermediate animal and those who defend the thesis of the flight from a laboratory in Wuhan.
Dr. Tedros sees it as a “scientific imperative”, but also “moral” vis-à-vis the millions of victims and their families.
He lamented “the continued politicization” of this quest for the origins of the worst pandemic in a century, which turned “what should be a purely scientific process into a geopolitical game”.
New intelligence would have tilted the US Department of Energy’s analysis on the side of the leak hypothesis, according to unnamed sources cited by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and CNN.
The US intelligence world is now even more divided, with some agencies believing that COVID arose through natural transmission.
The FBI director also accused China of trying to block the US-led investigation into the causes of the Covid19 pandemic.
Beijing vigorously disputes these claims.
The pandemic has claimed more than 7 million lives since the end of 2019, according to figures that are undoubtedly far below reality.
A team of specialists under the leadership 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, on the places where the pandemic seems to have started.
In a joint report, they had favored the hypothesis of the transmission to humans of the highly contagious virus by an animal which played the intermediary between the bat and the man, perhaps in a market in the city. Chinese.
No team was able to return to China and WHO officials repeatedly requested additional data, which until then had always been refused.
Dr Tedros repeated on Friday that the WHO does not intend to abandon the research and once more called on Beijing “to be transparent in sharing data, to carry out the necessary investigations and to share the results”.
He reaffirmed that he had written to many senior Chinese leaders, and had spoken with them on multiple occasions, “as recently as a few weeks ago”.
For the moment, he concluded, “all the hypotheses (…) remain on the table”.
He also stressed that States should soon begin negotiations at the WHO on a draft global agreement on pandemics, aimed at resolving the issue of information sharing and inequalities in access to vaccines observed between countries. wealthy and developing countries in the face of COVID.
Dr Tedros said he hoped the negotiations might be concluded by May 2024 and called on countries “to learn the lessons of this pandemic” so as not to repeat its mistakes.