WHO urges China to share COVID-19 data to determine the origins of the pandemic

“Understanding when, where and how pandemics and epidemics start is very difficult, but it is a scientific imperative to try to avoid future ones,” Tedros said (REUTERS/Tingshu Wang/File Photo/File Photo)

The World Health Organization (WHO) revived the controversy on Thursday over the Lack of transparency from Chinese authorities on the origin of the virus that caused the covid-19 pandemic, ensuring that if they are not more transparent, the beginning of that health crisis will remain a mystery.

“Unless China shares its data, the origins of Covid-19 will remain completely unknown,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“China’s collaboration is absolutely critical to finding the origins, including information on the first cases, on the Huanan market (where those initial infections were recorded) and on the work carried out in the Wuhan laboratories” said Tedros, who warned that until there is complete data “all hypotheses are up in the air.”

During the pandemic, there was a theory that the coronavirus accidentally escaped from a Chinese biosafety laboratory, which according to WHO experts who visited the Asian country to investigate the origins of the pandemic was the least likely of the hypotheses but not completely ruled out.

The controversy surrounding the origins of the virus has for years pitted China against countries such as the United States, whose authorities went so far as to ask the WHO to investigate as a priority the possibility of the pathogen escaping from a laboratory, something that caused outrage in the Chinese communist regime.

Tedros has put the issue back on the table when he published a guide on Wednesday to help member states know what issues to consider when analysing the origins of new pathogens with the potential to cause epidemics or pandemics.

During the pandemic, there was speculation that the coronavirus had accidentally escaped from a Chinese biosafety laboratory (REUTERS/Thomas Peter/File Photo)

“Understanding when, where and how outbreaks of pandemics and epidemics begin is very difficult, but it is a scientific imperative to try to avoid other futures“, Tedros stressed.

The WHO also called on researchers and governments to expand research into pathogens that could evolve and cause future pandemics.

These pathogens include: responsible for diseases such as gripehe COVID-19 and the tuberculosis, among others. This recommendation is supported by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an organization public-private partnership that includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and governments such as those of Germany, Japan, Norway, among others, which aims to finance independent research projects to develop vaccines against emerging infectious diseases.

In a press release, WHO said that together with CEPI, it “stressed the importance of expanding research to encompass entire families of pathogens that can infect humans – regardless of their presumed pandemic risk – and of focusing on specific pathogens.”

Priority pathogens that could trigger the next pandemic include influenza A virus, dengue virus and Mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, according to an updated list by the WHO.

“This method proposes using pathogen prototypes as guides or precursors to establish the knowledge base of entire families of pathogens,” they detailed in the publication. They added: “This strategy also aims to accelerate surveillance and investigation in order to understand the transmission of pathogens, how they infect humans and how the immune system responds to them.”

These postulates are part of a report presented by the WHO during the Global Pandemic Preparedness Summit held this week in Brazil. “We need to science and political determination come together while We are preparing for the next pandemic“, said the WHO Director-General.

(With information from EFE)