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The world health body sent an advance team to Beijing in July to lay the foundation for international investigation.
FILE: World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on July 3, 2020 at WHO headquarters in Geneva. Image: AFP
Geneva – The World Health Organization (WHO) insisted on Monday that it would do everything possible to find the animal origin of COVID-19, insisting that knowledge is vital to preventing future outbreaks.
“We want to know the origin and we will do everything possible to know the origin,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.
He insisted that the UN health agency intends to get to the bottom of the mystery, and urged critics who have accused it of handing over the reins of the investigation to China to stop “politicizing” the issue.
“The position of the WHO 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 most affected by the pandemic, has been harshly critical of the WHO’s handling of the crisis, accusing it of bowing to China and delaying in investigating how the outbreak began. .
Other critics have also raised concerns that the agency may have allowed China to dictate the terms of an international investigation into the origins of the virus, which first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year.
Since then, more than 1.46 million people have died and nearly 63 million have been infected worldwide.
The WHO has been working for months to send a team of international experts, including epidemiologists and animal health specialists, to China to help investigate the animal origin of the novel coronavirus pandemic and how the virus first passed to humans. .
The organization sent an advance team to Beijing in July to lay the foundations for the international investigation.
But it has not been clear when the largest team of scientists could 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.”
Meanwhile, Tedros on Monday rejected criticism for the lack of transparency in the investigation, noting that the names of the team’s experts and the terms of reference had been made public.
“There is nothing to hide. We want to know the origin. I don’t want to have any confusion about that.”
Scientists initially believed that the killer virus passed from animals to humans at a market that sells exotic animals for meat in the city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected late last year.
But experts now think that the market may not have been the source of the outbreak, but rather a place where it was amplified.
The virus is assumed to originate from bats, but the intermediate animal host that transmitted it between bats and humans is unknown.
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