The director of the World Health Organization stresses that without full access to Chinese information, you cannot say this or that.

‘All hypotheses are on the table’

GENEVA – Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, urged China to share its information about the origins of the Corona pandemic, saying that until this happens, all hypotheses remain on the table, more than three years after the virus first appeared.

“Without full access to the information that China has, you cannot say this or that,” he stressed, in response to a question about the origin of the virus.

“All hypotheses are on the table, this is the position of the World Health Organization and that is why we have been asking China to cooperate in this matter,” he added, adding, “If they do, we will know what happened or how it started.”

“We continue to call on China to be transparent in sharing data, conducting necessary investigations and sharing results,” he said in March.

The World Health Organization commissioned a scientific advisory group affiliated with it to continue investigating the origins of the pandemic, which has claimed the lives of nearly seven million people around the world.

We continue to call on China to be transparent.

The WHO and other scientists revealed that they could not rule out the possibility that the virus came out of a highly guarded laboratory in Wuhan that studies dangerous pathogens, while China denies any such relationship.

The virus was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, as many suspected it had spread to a live animal market before spreading around the world.

Chinese scientists uploaded data from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in summary form to an international database last month.

It included genetic sequences found in more than 1,000 environmental and animal samples taken in January 2020 at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, the site of the first known outbreak of the coronavirus.

The data showed that DNA from multiple animal species, including raccoon dogs, was present in environmental samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, indicating that they were the “most likely media” for transmission of the disease. According to a team of international researchers.

Wuhan

The virus is likely to come out of here

However, in a non-peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature this week, scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention questioned the international team’s findings, saying the samples did not provide evidence that the animals were actually infected, as they were also taken a month after transmission. Human-to-human transmission for the first time on the market, so even if the test result is positive, it is possible that animals have caught the virus from humans.

Maria Van Kerkhove of the World Health Organization, the technical officer responsible for combating COVID-19, said that the latest Chinese information provided some “clues” on the origin of the virus, but there are no answers.

She added that the organization is working with scientists to learn more about early cases from 2019, such as the whereabouts of the infected.

And she stated that the Health Organization is still ignorant of whether some of the required research was conducted in China, following up that the Health Organization also asked the United States to obtain original data that supports a recent study conducted by the US Department of Energy indicating that a laboratory leak in China is what most likely caused it. in the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The US House of Representatives unanimously approved a bill aimed at declassifying intelligence information about possible links between the Covid-19 epidemic, caused by the Corona virus, and a Chinese laboratory suspected of having leaked the virus.