GENEVA,
Switzerland
The WHO chief urged China to be more cooperative in the next phase of investigations into the pandemic origins, demanding more access to raw data.
Speaking
to reporters in Geneva, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also acknowledged that a
prior push to all but rule out the possibility that Covid-19 may have escaped
from a lab had been “premature”.
He
said that the WHO was laying the groundwork for moving forward with fresh
investigations into where Covid-19 came from, adding “we hope there will be
better cooperation to get to the bottom of what happened.”
The
UN health agency has been facing intensifying pressure for a new, more in-depth
investigation of Covid-19’s origins.
The
WHO only managed to send a team of independent, international experts to
China’s Wuhan in January, more than a year after Covid-19 first surfaced there
in late 2019, to help their Chinese counterparts probe the pandemic origins.
Tedros
acknowledged Thursday that one of the main challenges during the first phase of
the investigation was “access to raw data… The raw data was not shared.”
“And
now we have designed the second phase of the study and we are asking actually
China to be transparent, to be open and cooperate, especially on the … raw data
that we asked for (in) the early days of the pandemic.”
The
long-delayed report after the first phase of the investigation was published in
late March, with the international team and their Chinese counterparts drawing
no firm conclusions about the pandemic origins.
Instead
they ranked a number of hypotheses according to how likely they believed they
were, finding that it was most likely the virus jumped from bats to humans via
an intermediate animal, while a theory involving the virus leaking from a
laboratory was deemed “extremely unlikely”.
The
investigation and report have faced criticism for lacking transparency and
access, and for not evaluating the lab-leak theory more deeply — a mere 440
words of the report were dedicated to discussing and dismissing it.
Long
derided as a right-wing conspiracy theory, and vehemently rejected by Beijing,
the idea that Covid-19 may have emerged from a lab leak has been gaining
increasing momentum in the United States especially.
Tedros,
who emphasised that all theories remained on the table immediately after the
report was published, reiterated Thursday that more investigation into the lab
leak hypothesis was needed.
“There
was a premature push” to rule out that theory, he said.
The
WHO chief, who is an immunologist, stressed that he himself had previously
worked as a lab technician, “and lab accidents happen.”
“It’s
common. I have seen it happening,” he said, stressing that “checking what
happened, especially in our labs, is important.”
“We
need information, direct information on what the situation of these labs was
before, at the start of the pandemic.”
Tedros
had previously lamented that the international team did not have access to all
the raw data needed to make a proper assessment.
Pointing
to the more than four million official deaths from Covid worldwide, the WHO
chief said: “I think we owe it to them to know what happened.”
“We
need to know what happened to prevent the next one.”
Africa recorded
a 43% jump in Covid-19 deaths last week as infections and hospital admissions
have risen and countries face shortages of oxygen and intensive-care beds, the
World Health Organisation said on Thursday.
The
continent’s case fatality rate – the proportion of deaths among confirmed cases
– stands at 2.6% against the global average of 2.2%, WHO Africa said in its
weekly briefing.
“Africa’s
third wave continues its destructive pathway, pushing past yet another grim
milestone as the continent’s case count tops 6mn,” Matshidiso Moeti, WHO
regional director for Africa, told the briefing.
The
surge in infections, which is partly driven by the presence of the highly
transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus in 21 African countries, is
leaving a “brutal cost in lives lost” in its trail, she said. Deaths have
climbed steeply for the past five weeks to 6,273 last week, just a percentage
point shy of its weekly peak recorded in January.
“This
is a clear warning sign that hospitals in the most impacted countries are
reaching a breaking point,” Moeti said. - AFP
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