WHO Urges China for Greater Transparency on Origins of Covid-19 with Additional Scientific Data

China has additional scientific data that would allow a better understanding of the origins of covid-19assured the World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday, in an umpteenth call for greater transparency from the Asian giant on this issue.

“Without full access to the information that China has (…) all the hypotheses (about the origin of the coronavirus) are still on the table. This is the position of the WHO and, for this reason, we ask China to cooperate”, said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of this UN agency, during a press conference in Geneva.

“If he does, we’ll know what happened and how it started.”he added.

“We know that (China) has supplementary information and we need scientists, public health professionals and governments to share this information. This is not a game”, said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, who leads the fight against covid-19 at the WHO, during the same appearance.

Three years after the appearance of covid-19, debates about the origins of the pandemic continue.

Most of the scientific community believes that the coronavirus arose from an animal that transmitted it to a human being, probably in the Huanan market in the east-central Chinese city of Wuhan.

However, American scientists and leaders defend the hypothesis that a leak occurred in a laboratory in the same town in the Asian giant. China opposes this theory, but has long denied that there were animals in the Huanan market that could have transmitted the virus.

However, according to new Chinese data, published in late January and quickly suppressed, there is molecular evidence of the sale of animals on the market. “We had doubts about it, but now we have proof,” Van Kerkhove said.

“We also know that among the samples with a positive diagnosis of SARS-Cov-2, there was DNA from animals,” he added. But, according to this American epidemiologist, as long as all the scientific data is not available, any hypothesis about the origin of covid-19 cannot be ruled out. (I)