Following a report that suggested the organization had given up on the search, the head of the World Health Organization stated on Wednesday that the organization will keep pushing until it discovers the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Following a report that suggested the organization had given up on the search, the head of the World Health Organization stated on Wednesday that the organization will keep pushing until it discovers the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic.
For the purpose of preventing future pandemics, it is considered essential to solve the mystery of the origin of the SARS CoV-2 virus and how it began to spread among humans.
However, a Tuesday article on the Nature website stated that the WHO had given up on the search because of China’s lack of cooperation, where the outbreak began in late 2019.
In reference to the investigation into where the virus originated, agency chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus advised reporters, “We need to continue to push until we get the answer.”
He stated, “It is very, very important and very crucial to know how this pandemic started.”
He claimed that he had recently written a letter to a high-ranking Chinese official “asking for cooperation, because we need cooperation and transparency in the information… in order to understand how this started.”
The virus naturally spreading from bats to humans through an intermediary animal or escaping through a lab accident have been the two main contentions in the heated debate.
The WHO “quietly shelved the second phase of its much-anticipated scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to the Nature report.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO expert in charge of the agency’s response to Covid, was quoted as saying, “There is no phase two.”
According to her statement to the report, the WHO had planned for the work to be completed in phases, but “that plan has changed” and “The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins.”
When asked about the article on Wednesday, Van Kerkhove responded in an angry, “open, transparent” manner, blaming “an error in reporting, which is really quite concerning because it’s causing some headlines that are inaccurate” for the interpretation that WHO had shelved its origins search.
She stated, “WHO has not abandoned studying the origins of COVID-19, neither have we nor will we.”
We have always been open and transparent, and there was no quiet shelving of plans.
In early 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched the first phase of its investigation by sending a group of international experts to Wuhan, China, to collaborate on the creation of a first phase report.
However, that investigation was criticized for not adequately evaluating the “extremely unlikely” lab-leak theory and for not providing sufficient transparency and access.
Over that theory, which was supported by the administration of the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, but China consistently and categorically rejected, political rhetoric reached fever pitch.
In the meantime, Tedros has insisted from the beginning that all hypotheses remain open, and the WHO has repeatedly urged China to grant additional access for investigation.
Van Kerkhove recalled on Wednesday that the WHO had shifted tactics in mid-2021 and decided instead to create a team of scientists with an expanded scope to investigate new pathogens and study how to prevent future pandemics while continuing to investigate Covid-19’s origins, despite the initial plan to send a second team.
According to Van Kerkhove, the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) was established “to conduct an independent assessment of the origins of COVID-19, as well as to work more broadly to establish a framework to understand the origins of any future epidemic and pandemic pathogen, and the origins in which it emerges.” This was the purpose for which the group was established.
She stated, “We will continue to ask countries to depoliticize this work, but we need cooperation from our Chinese colleagues to advance this.”
Tedros stated that the origins search should not be abandoned for two reasons.
He stated that the first was scientific: In order to stop the next one, we need to know how it started.
The following is moral: The entire world was taken hostage by a virus, and millions of people died and suffered.
“Knowing how we lost our loved ones is very morally important.”
