The World Health Organisation (WHO) said yesterday that it is setting up a new group to trace the origins of the coronavirus (Covid-19), seeking to end what it called “political point scoring” that had hampered investigations.
The inability of the WHO to say where and how the virus began spreading has fuelled tensions among its members, particularly between China, where Covid-19 cases were first identified in Wuhan in late 2019, and the United States.
The WHO called for all governments to co-operate to accelerate studies into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and “to depoliticise the situation”.
It specified that a new advisory group called the International Scientific Advisory Group for Origins of Novel Pathogens would support “the rapid undertaking” of further studies.
“We should work all together. You, me, everyone wants to know the origin of worst pandemic in a century,” WHO spokesperson Fadela Chaib said yesterday.
President Joe Biden in May ordered aides to find answers on Covid-19 origins.
In its final report, written jointly with Chinese scientists, a WHO-led team that spent four weeks in and around the city of Wuhan in January and February said that the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal.
It said a leak from a laboratory was “extremely unlikely” as a cause.