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The World Health Organization insisted on Monday that it would do everything possible to find the animal origins of Covid-19, insisting that knowledge is vital to preventing future epidemics.
“We want to know the origin and we will do everything to know the origin,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.
He insisted that the UN health agency was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, and urged critics who accused it of handing over the reins of the investigation to China to stop “politicizing ” the question.
“The WHO position is very, very clear. We need to know the origin of this virus because it can help us prevent future outbreaks, ”Tedros said.
The United States, which with more than 262,000 deaths is the country hardest hit by the pandemic, has been severely critical of the WHO’s handling of the crisis and accused it of bowing to China and hanging around the feet to investigate the start of the epidemic. .
Other critics have also expressed concern that the agency has allowed China to dictate the terms of an international investigation into the origins of the virus, which first surfaced in the Chinese city of Wuhan. at the end of last year.
Since then, more than 1.46 million people have died and nearly 63 million have been infected worldwide.
WHO has been working for months to send a team of international experts, including epidemiologists and animal health specialists, to China to help probe the animal origin of the novel coronavirus pandemic and how the virus got is first transmitted to humans.
The organization sent a preliminary team to Beijing in July to lay the groundwork for the international investigation.
But it’s still unclear when the larger team of scientists might travel to China to begin epidemiological studies to try to identify the first human cases and their source of infection.
Last week, WHO emergency chief Michael Ryan said the agency hoped to send the international team to Wuhan “as soon as possible.”
Tedros meanwhile dismissed criticism of the lack of transparency on the investigation on Monday, stressing that the names of the team’s experts and terms of reference had been made public.
“There is nothing to hide. We want to know the origin. I don’t want to be confused about this.
Scientists initially believed the killer virus had passed from animals to humans at a market selling exotic animals for meat in the city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected late last year.
But experts now believe the market may not have been the source of the outbreak, but rather a place where it has amplified.
It is widely believed that the virus originated in bats, but the intermediate animal host that transmitted it between bats and humans remains unknown.
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