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Covid origins report postponed, likely due next week: WHO
GENEVA, March 16, 2021 (BSS/AFP) – An international expert team that
visited China to investigate the origins of Covid-19 has postponed publishing
their report, which will now likely appear next week, the WHO said Tuesday.
“The report is simply not ready,” World Health Organization spokesman
Christian Lindmeier told reporters.
“What we hear from the technical experts, from the mission members, is that
the report most likely will come out now next week,” he added.
The highly-anticipated report is expected to examine a range of theories
about how the virus first jumped from animals to humans, which the experts
looked into during their four-week mission to Wuhan — the city where the
first Covid-19 cases were identified.
Experts believe that the new coronavirus that causes Covid-19 originally
came from bats, and crossed into humans via an intermediate animal, but
remain unsure on when and how that happened.
During a lengthy press conference in Wuhan on February 9 at the end of the
mission, the experts and their Chinese counterparts made clear that they
could not yet draw any firm conclusions.
But the world has been eagerly anticipating the report ever since for more
insight into how the experts ranked a number of hypotheses, including
theories about wild animal meat brought to Wuhan from southern China, one
about a lab accident and another about the virus being imported in frozen
food.
– Repeated delays –
The team had initially planned to quickly publish a preliminary report, but
that plan was shelved in February without a clear explanation.
Then WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced at the beginning of
March that the full report would be published sometime this week, promising
to give member states an advance peek at the conclusions.
The repeated delays have sparked renewed criticism of the UN health body’s
slow response to a demand by its member states last May for an independent,
international team to assist Chinese experts in probing the origins of the
Covid-19 pandemic.
It took months to select the 10 international experts, including
epidemiologists and animal health specialists, and diplomatic wrangling with
China delayed the mission further.
In the end, they arrived in Wuhan more than a year after the first cases of
SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes Covid-19 disease — were first discovered
there, in December 2019.
Since then, nearly 2.7 million people have died worldwide and the global
economy lies in tatters.
Lindmeier said Tuesday that the team of experts, who are drafting the
report with their Chinese counterparts, were still finalising the document.
“The experts are drawing it up together, and… the more people involved,
the more people will have to have a say in it,” he said.
“They want to get it right. That is the important part.”
BSS/AFP/FI/ 1846 hrs