While rumors said that the organization had abandoned its investigation into the origins of Covid-19, the boss of the WHO reaffirmed that there was “a scientific and moral dimension to this problem”.
The head of the World Health Organization personally pledged on Wednesday to do everything to obtain “an answer” on the origins of Covid-19, firmly denying reports that the organization has given up its investigation.
“There is a scientific and moral dimension to this problem and we must continue to push 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 a meeting. a press briefing.
“It’s very, very important and very, very crucial,” he insisted.
He pointed out that he had recently sent an official letter to a senior Chinese official to once once more request Beijing’s collaboration in the search for the origins of the worst pandemic in a century, killing millions of people and incapacitating dozens of them. millions more.
“Quietly Suspended”
An article from 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.
The scientific community believes that it is crucial to know the origins of this pandemic in order to better fight or even avoid 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,” writes Nature.
Quoted in the article, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, who has been in charge of the fight once morest the pandemic at the WHO since its inception, denied.
“The WHO has not abandoned the study of the origin of Covid,” she said during the press conference; and to insist: “We have not abandoned any plan. We will not stop until we understand the origins and it becomes more and more difficult because the more time passes, the more difficult it is to really understand what happened in those early stages of the pandemic.”
“We continue to ask for more cooperation and collaboration from our colleagues in China, to advance the studies that need to take place in China,” she added. “We will go where science leads 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 concerning because it makes for inaccurate headlines.”
Venue yet to be determined
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.
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 – leans in favor of a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan, where SARS-like coronaviruses CoV-2 were studied.
Dr. Michael Ryan, head of emergency situations at the WHO, repeated that “all hypotheses remain on the table” until the mystery has been solved.
No team was able to return to China and WHO officials repeatedly requested additional data, which until then had always been denied.
The WHO also created in October 2021 the Scientific Advisory Group on the Origins of New Pathogens (SAGO). Its mission goes far beyond the framework of the sole investigation of the origins of Covid-19 and it must above all establish a catalog of best practices to enable better and more rapid detection of the vector of the next pandemic.
As for Doctor Ryan – clearly tired of criticism once morest his organization – he recalled that the primary responsibility for finding the origins of a pandemic “rested in the hands of the State” where it started.
