COVID-19 origin probe 'stalled', time 'running out', says WHO experts
The quest for the roots of the Covid epidemic, which has killed millions and devastated economies, has come to a halt, even though time is running out, experts tasked with the task said Wednesday.
FollowChina responded to the WHO request earlier this month, claiming that the January inquiry was sufficient and that requests for further data were motivated by politics rather than science. The quest for the roots of the Covid epidemic, which has killed millions and devastated economies, has come to a halt, even though time is running out, experts tasked with the task said Wednesday.
The World Health Organization sent foreign scientists to China to investigate the origins of the coronavirus stated Wednesday that the investigation has stagnated and that the window of opportunity for solving the riddle is "closing fast."
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The WHO-recruited experts stated in an editorial published in the journal Nature that the origins inquiry is at a “critical juncture” that requires close collaboration but has instead come to a halt. They observed, among other things, that Chinese officials are still hesitant to disclose certain raw data, citing patient confidentiality concerns.
Earlier this year, the global health body dispatched a team of experts to Wuhan, where the first human COVID-19 cases were discovered in December 2019 to investigate what caused the pandemic.
In its March research, the WHO experts found that the virus most likely moved from animals to people, and they classified the likelihood of a laboratory breach as “extremely unlikely.”
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The World Health Organization's original assessment, submitted to China in January by a team of independent international specialists, found that the SARS-CoV-2 virus most likely crossed from bats to people via an intermediary species.
Tracing the biological path back to the disease's first spots, which first appeared in Wuhan in late 2019, is becoming more difficult as evidence vanishes or becomes contaminated.
The announcement comes less than two weeks after the WHO, in an effort to restart the investigation, requested China to turn over information on the first Covid-19 cases.
