GENEVA – Just days after Beijing rejected calls for a renewed probe into the origins of Covid-19, the World Health Organisation (WHO) yesterday said it remains confident that China will cooperate in the investigation.
Pressure has again been mounting on Beijing to consider a fresh probe into the origins of a pandemic that has killed more than four million people and paralysed economies worldwide since it first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.
“I’m confident... that our colleagues in China are very much willing to cooperate on the scientific studies that are needed to further explore the origins,” WHO emergencies director Mike Ryan told reporters.
His comment comes after Beijing on Friday rejected as political a call from the United Nations health agency for raw data from the earliest Covid-19 cases to help revive the origins probe.
WHO – and Ryan, in particular – has repeatedly appealed for a depoliticisation of the origins investigation, seen as vital to helping prevent future pandemics.
“I think what’s happened in all of this is that the politics have really contaminated the environment and changed the atmosphere,” he said yesterday.
“We’re working very hard behind the scenes to increase the level of confidence, and to get people to recommit to the scientific process.
“I believe we’re making headway in that,” he said, acknowledging, though, that the task is “not that easy given some of the rhetoric that we’ve all experienced over the last number of weeks and months”.
The rhetoric and finger-pointing contributed to delaying the first phase of the probe, with WHO able to send a team of international experts to Wuhan only in January, more than a year after the pandemic erupted.
The team’s report, written in conjunction with its Chinese counterparts, drew no firm conclusions, instead ranking four hypotheses.
It said the virus jumping from bats to humans via an intermediate animal is the most probable scenario, while a leak from the Wuhan virology lab is “extremely unlikely”.
However, the investigation faced criticism for lacking transparency and access, and for not evaluating the lab-leak theory more thoroughly, with the United States upping the pressure ever since.
In the face of China’s reluctance to open up to outside investigators, experts are increasingly open to considering the theory that the virus could have leaked out of the lab, once dismissed as a conspiracy propagated by the US far right.
Even WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said the initial probe into the virology lab did not go far enough, while US President Joe Biden in May ordered a separate probe by the American intelligence community into the virus’ origins.
A WHO call last month for the investigation’s second stage to include audits of the Wuhan lab infuriated Beijing, with Health Vice-Minister Zeng Yixin saying the plan shows “disrespect for common sense and arrogance towards science”. – AFP, August 19, 2021
