WHO envoys in Wuhan will not release preliminary report on origin of COVID-19

World Health Organization (WHO) experts sent to Wuhan, China in January to investigate the origin of the covid-19 pandemic, will not release their preliminary findings, the newspaper said Thursday. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

The decision was made amid growing tensions between the United States and China over the conditions of access offered by Beijing to the team to carry out its task..

The Director-General of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had announced on February 12 that experts would quickly publish a preliminary report which would summarize the investigations carried out during a month in China.

This first report was still awaiting Thursday, nearly three weeks after the end of the mission in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the pandemic would have appeared at the end of 2019.

“A simple summary would not satisfy the curiosity of readers ”, The head of the investigation team, Peter Ben Embarek, told the WSJ.

Now, the WHO plans to publish “in the coming weeks” a full report that will include the “main findings”, according to a WHO spokesperson quoted by the American newspaper.

The United States expects China to be “transparent”, to share what it knows about the early days of the pandemic, State Department spokesman Ned Price said Thursday.

“It’s about learning and taking action, about being positioned to do whatever we can to protect each other, the American people and the international community, against future pandemic threats.Price said.

“That’s why we need this understanding. This is why we need the transparency of the Chinese government “, he claimed.

Meanwhile, the WHO has ruled out that humanity can end the covid-19 pandemic by the end of the year. “It would be very premature and, I think, unrealistic to think that we are going to end this virus before 2022,” said Michael Ryan, director of emergency operations at the agency.

For the official, however, it is possible “that what we can eliminate, if we are smart, are the hospitalizations, deaths and tragedies associated with this pandemic. “.

At the same time, the institution warned that, For the first time in seven weeks, coronavirus cases around the world have increased, something that the organization’s CEO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, called “disappointing but not surprising”.

With the exception of Africa and the Western Pacific, all regions saw an increase in infections last week. According to the director, this could be due to “the relaxation of public health measures, the continued circulation of variants and the declining guard”.

(With information from AFP)

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