The World Health Organization (WHO) continues to be working to discover the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, its director general said on Friday, after a U.S. agency was reported to have assessed the pandemic had likely been attributable to a Chinese laboratory leak.
“I actually have written to and spoken with high-level Chinese leaders on multiple occasions as recently as just a number of weeks ago… all hypotheses on the origins of the virus remain on the table,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that the U.S. Energy Department had concluded the pandemic likely arose from a Chinese laboratory leak, an assessment Beijing denies.
“I want to be very clear that WHO has not abandoned any plans to discover the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Tedros said.
The U.S. Energy Department made its judgment with “low confidence” in a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress, the Journal said, citing people who had read the intelligence report.
4 other U.S. agencies, together with a national intelligence panel, still think COVID-19 was likely the results of natural transmission, while two are undecided, the Journal reported.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19, expressed frustration on Twitter on Thursday that the US had not shared additional information with the WHO on its reports assessing the origin of the virus.
On Friday, she urged countries, institutions and research groups that may need any information on the origins of the pandemic to share it with the international community.
“We don’t completely have the answers to how this pandemic began and it stays absolutely critical that we proceed to give attention to this,” she said.
She said it was crucial to review coronaviruses circulating in animals and the way people come into contact with those animals.
“Our work continues on this space: taking a look at studies in humans, taking a look at studies in animals, taking a look at studies on the animal human interface, and likewise taking a look at potential breaches in biosafety and biosecurity for any of the labs that were working with coronaviruses, particularly where the primary cases were detected in Wuhan, China, or elsewhere,” she said.
— Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber in Geneva, Bhanvi Satija and Sriparna Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne
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