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Wuhan (China) – An expert from the World Health Organization mission to China, which investigated the origin of the Coronavirus, questioned on Wednesday the validity of US information on the epidemic that continues to spread in the world and leads to the imposition of stricter restrictions than pose more and more. review.
Peter Dazak, a member of the WHO mission, wrote on the last day of the visit to Wuhan, in central China, in a tweet: “Do not trust too much information from the United States”, referring to statements made by a spokesman for the Department of State, in which it avoided adopting the first conclusions of the WHO experts after their tour of Wuhan.
The previous administration headed by Donald Trump accused the Institute of Virology in Wuhan of allowing the virus to leak, by accident or intentionally.
Although the Biden administration on Tuesday distanced itself from the hypothesis that the virus had leaked from the laboratory, at the same time it did not adopt the WHO team’s conclusions.
“Rather than jumping to conclusions driven by anything other than science, we want to see where the data, as well as science, takes us, and we will base our conclusions on that basis,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price.
In response to a question to comment on Washington’s position, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Win Bin told reporters that his country will continue to cooperate with the World Health Organization in an “open and transparent” manner. .
He asked Washington to do the same, and expressed the hope that WHO experts could in turn go to the United States to shed light on the origin of the epidemic.
After four weeks in Wuhan, the WHO experts in charge of investigating the origin of Covid-19 announced that they could not reveal the origin of the virus, considering that the theory of its escape from a laboratory was “extremely unlikely”, without being able to identify the animal responsible for transmitting the epidemic to humans.
Peter Ben Embark, head of the World Health Organization delegation investigating Wuhan, the epicenter of the epidemic, said that the transmission of the new Corona virus from one animal to another and from there to humans is “the most likely hypothesis. probable”.
But he added that this path requires “targeted and more specific investigations.”
“There is no indication of transmission of SARS-Cove-2 in the population in the period before December 2019,” Liang Wanyan, head of the China team, told a press conference, adding that “there is insufficient evidence.” to determine if the virus had spread in the city before that. He noted that transmission of the infection from an animal is likely, but so far, “the host has not yet been identified.”
Since the first COVID-19 cases appeared in Wuhan, the epidemic has killed more than 2.3 million people worldwide.
The head of the World Health Organization’s mission to Wuhan announced that the hypothesis of a leak of the Corona virus from a laboratory was “extremely excluded.”
“We are at the heart of a study process and we need time and effort to understand” what happened, said the expert, who is co-director of the Human and Animal Health Program at the International Institute for Livestock Research in Nairobi.
The Wuhan mission ends, as experts from the World Health Organization examined the AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine on Monday, whose efficacy has been questioned for the elderly and the mutated version of the Corona virus that appeared in South Africa.
This vaccine, which the United Kingdom was the first country to use on a large scale to immunize its population since last December, has been licensed in many countries as well as in the European Union. However, some governments have preferred to recommend it only for those under 65 or even 55 because there is insufficient data on its effectiveness in older people.
And on Sunday, South Africa suspended the launch of its vaccination campaign, which was scheduled to begin in the next few days with one million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, following the publication of a study indicating “limited” effectiveness of the vaccine against the South. African version of the modified virus.
According to preliminary results of the study, the vaccine is effective in only 22 percent of average infections with the mutated version from South Africa. So far, no results are available on its efficacy in severe cases.
But Richard Hatchett, who heads the research arm of the Kovacs mechanism established by the WHO to ensure a fair distribution of means to combat the epidemic, stressed that it is “too early to abandon this vaccine”, which “forms an important part of the global response to the current epidemic “.
For his part, an AstraZeneca spokesman told AFP: “We believe that our vaccine protects against all dangerous forms of the disease.”
