April 2 ------ The WHO’s chief, long accused of complacency towards Beijing, hardened his tone Tuesday, urging further investigation into a theory COVID-19 sprang from a laboratory leak. The director-general of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also rebuked China for sitting on key data. The theory that the new coronavirus may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city where it was first detected in humans in December 2019, was a US favorite under former president Donald Trump.
China has always flatly rejected the hypothesis. And the team of international experts sent to Wuhan by the World Health Organization earlier this year to probe the pandemic’s origins have also all but ruled it out. Their long-delayed report, written alongside the team’s Chinese counterparts and published Tuesday, ranked four hypotheses in order of probability.
They said the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 disease most probably jumped from bats to humans via an intermediary animal, judging a lab leak to be an “extremely unlikely” source. But Tedros said Tuesday the probe into Wuhan’s virology labs had not gone far enough, adding that he was prepared to launch a fresh investigation. “I do not believe that this assessment was extensive enough,” he told the UN health agency’s 194 member states, in a briefing on the Covid origins report. “Further data and studies will be needed to reach more robust conclusions,” he said. “Although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation, potentially with additional missions involving specialist experts, which I am ready to deploy.”
Source: mb.com.ph