The mission of international experts that was in China between last January and February to investigate the origin of the coronavirus, will present to the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) a series of proposals on the additional studies that are required to advance in this investigation, a spokeswoman for the international entity said on Friday.
Once the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, receives the recommendations, he will make them known to the member states of the Organization and will decide with them what will be the next steps to follow, said spokeswoman Fadela Chaib, who added that there would be no specific deadline for it.
The United States government has just reopened the controversy about the origin of the virus by announcing that its intelligence services will intensify their investigations to find out – within 90 days – what was the origin of the pandemic and decide between the two scenarios that kept open: that of the contagion of the human being by an infected animal or a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China.
“The United States Intelligence Community does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus was initially transmitted, but it has come together around two likely scenarios,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said, adding that the majority believe that there is “not enough information to evaluate one as more likely than the other.”
The ODNI statement did not identify which two of the 17 agencies that make up the country’s intelligence community believe the virus originated in infected animals and which it believes originated from a laboratory accident.
In both cases, however, ODNI said that agencies supporting either origin theory did so with “low or moderate confidence,” which in spy agent jargon means they believe the evidence supporting their point of view is far from conclusive.
A source familiar with intelligence community analyzes said that neither the CIA nor the Defense Intelligence Agency currently favors any alternative explanation for the origin of the virus, adding that they are among the vast majority of US offices who believe that the information to date is insufficient to determine that one scenario is more likely than the other.
The WHO’s top emergency expert said on Friday that efforts to determine the origin of COVID-19 are “poisoned by politics,” days after US President Joe Biden ordered his advisers to investigate how it emerged. the pandemic.
“We would like everyone to separate, if they can, politics from science on this issue. This whole process is being poisoned by politics,” Mike Ryan told reporters.
“Each country and each entity is free to follow its own theories of origin, it is a free world,” said Ryan. “WHO is an organization of member states and we seek to work with all of our members to collectively seek answers,” he added.
The international mission (17 international experts and 17 Chinese) sent by the WHO to China at the beginning of the year to investigate the same did not reach firm conclusions and left four scenarios open, but considered that the most likely was that the coronavirus had become human through one or more animals that acted as an intermediary species.
Instead, he considered the possibility that the pandemic originated in a laboratory was “highly unlikely.”
Faced with these results, which were published in mid-March, Tedros considered that the investigation had not been exhaustive enough and requested additional studies to reach “more solid conclusions”, although since then no concrete progress has been reported.
The United States criticized the delay with which the mission delivered its report and that it had not had access to “original and complete” tests and samples of the virus.
Chaib explained that among the areas that require more research are the early detection of cases and groups of cases, as well as the potential role of animal markets, transmission through the food chain and the hypothesis of a laboratory accident, that is, the four scenarios presented by the international mission.
This Thursday, the United States asked the WHO to carry out a second phase of its investigation into the origins of the coronavirus and that independent experts have full access to the original data and samples in China.
President Joe Biden directed his advisers to find answers to the origin of the virus that causes COVID-19, and said the country’s intelligence agencies are working on rival theories that could include the possibility of a laboratory accident in China.
“It is essential that China provide independent experts with full access to complete and original data and relevant samples to understand the origin of the virus and the early stages of the pandemic,” the US mission to the UN in Geneva said in a statement.
With information from EFE and Reuters
