WHO promises to "do everything" to know the origins of Covid-19

The World Health Organization has still not been able to send a scientific team to China but it is not resigned.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the boss of the WHO, promised Monday to do everything to know the origin of the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, rejecting accusations that the UN agency is too complacent towards the Asian country.

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"We want to know the origin and we will do everything to know it," he promised on Monday, while the agency is still hoping for a green light from Beijing to be able to send its own experts.

WHO officials have been hammering out their desire to go there for weeks.

“We want to believe that we will have a team on the pitch.

It is absolutely essential that our international team be able to join its Chinese colleagues and go into the field ”, underlined again last week Mike Ryan, responsible for emergency situations at the WHO.

Diplomatic tensions and conspiracy

An international team, made up of ten recognized scientists, has been set up to try to trace the origins of the virus and find out how it was transmitted to humans, but it has so far been unable to travel to China, where the pandemic started at the end of 2019. While scientists generally believe that the original host of the virus is a bat, we do not know the intermediate animal that allowed human contamination, now that the pangolin is no longer considered a prime suspect.

This lack of knowledge has fueled diplomatic tensions in recent months.

The United States has publicly accused Beijing of hiding things and the WHO of bending too much to the will of the Chinese authorities.

Other member states, while being less critical, however suspect Beijing of slowing down the process.

For now, the WHO has only been able to send a reconnaissance team to China in July.

The lack of response has also fueled many theories, more or less conspiratorial.

For some to evoke a virus created from scratch by man, based on patents filed several years ago.

In particular the one relating to a Covid-19 screening test which would have been filed in 2015. Pure fake news, since the reference to the virus was added last September, as AFP recently reported.

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Another hypothesis evokes a virus possibly escaped from a laboratory, and why not in particular the P4 laboratory in Wuhan.

On this point, several specialists believe that this hypothesis should not be ruled out, although it is absolutely not supported to date.

All over the world, in fact, scientists are working on viruses to try to understand how they can be transmitted to humans.

The hypothesis of an accident cannot be ruled out.