WHO chief ordered further investigation into possible origin of coronavirus in Wuhan laboratory

The head of the World Health Organization asked researchers on Tuesday about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic whichdelve into the theory of a possible laboratory incident, after he was all but ruled out by official reports.

“Although the team concluded that a lab leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation, possibly with additional missions involving specialist experts, which I am ready to deployTedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a briefing to WHO member states on the researchers’ long-awaited report following an international mission to Wuhan, China.

The WHO chief also expressed his concern about the difficulties encountered by the international team in accessing data during the mission, adding: “I hope future collaborative studies will include more timely and comprehensive data sharing.

“With regard to WHO, all the assumptions are still on the table. This report is a very important start, but it is not the end. We have not yet found the origin of the virus and we must continue to follow the science and leave nothing to be desired during this time.“Tedros said in a statement.

The report argues that the most likely theory for the origin of the pandemic is transmission of the coronavirus from bats to humans via another animal, while the hypothesis of a laboratory origin is “extremely unlikely. “, firstly because there are no records of any laboratory that worked before December 2019 with a virus close to SARS-CoV-2 or studying genomes which, combined, could give rise to it.

About the three laboratories in Wuhan, which scientists were able to visit briefly and which are working with the coronavirus, have all been found to meet high biosafety standards and are well managed. Contrary to some information that has circulated, the report maintains that no one among the workers exhibited symptoms compatible with COVID-19 in the weeks and months leading up to the end of 2019.

WHO Special Envoy David Nabarro admitted on Tuesday that it is “notoriously difficult” to find the origin of the virus that caused the pandemic, but working on several hypotheses. “Finding the origin of a virus, when you’re trying to explain where a disease comes from, is notoriously difficult,” Nabarro told BBC Radio 4.

“We do not know the precise origin of HIV (the AIDS virus), we do not know the precise origin of Ebola and it will take a long time to find the precise origin of COVID-19”, added the expert before the WHO officially. publishes its report on the pandemic. Nabarro said the organization is working on various assumptions, but this work takes time.

Regarding the initial WHO hypothesis (transmission by an intermediate species), which appears in the report as the most plausible, the scientists recall that Genomic data collected from animals indicates that the coronaviruses most closely related to the one that causes COVID-19 have been found in bats and pangolins, indicating that these mammals may act as natural reservoirs. However, things are not at all clear because “none of the viruses that have been identified in these species are sufficiently similar to SARS-CoV-2 to be its direct progenitors”explains the report.

“More than 80,000 samples of wild animals, livestock and poultry have been collected in 31 Chinese provinces and no results could be identified with the new coronavirus,” the report said. What there is no doubt, as science has established, is that the vast majority of emerging viruses come from animals.

The WHO report, in English:

(With information from EFE and AFP)