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A group of experts in charge by the World Health Organization to investigate how the Pandemic COVVI-19 began to publish its final report on Friday, reaching an unsatisfactory conclusion: scientists still do not know how the worst health emergency of a century has started.
During a press briefing, Marietjie Ventter, the group’s chair, said most scientific data support the hypothesis that the new coronavirus had jumped to animal humans.
It was also the conclusion drawn by the first group of experts from the WHO which studied the origins of the pandemic in 2021, when scientists concluded that the virus probably spread from bats to humans, via another intermediate animal. At the time, which said that a laboratory leak was “extremely improbable”.
Venter said that after more than three years of work, the WHO expert group was unable to obtain the data necessary to assess if COVID-19 was the result of a laboratory accident, despite repeated requests for hundreds of genetic sequences and more detailed biosecurity information that has been made to the Chinese government.
“Consequently, this hypothesis could not be studied or excluded,” she said. “He was deemed very speculative, based on political opinions and not supported by science.”
She said that the group of 27 members had not reached consensus; A member resigned earlier this week and three other people asked that their names be withdrawn from the report.
Ventter said there was no evidence to prove that COVID-19 had been manipulated in a laboratory, and there was no indication that the virus had spread before December 2019 anywhere outside China.
“Until more scientific data becomes available, the origins of the way Sras-Cov has entered human populations will remain inconclusive,” said Venter, referring to the scientific name of the COVVI-19 virus.
The director general of WHO Tedros, Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that it was a “moral imperative” to determine how Covid started, noting that the virus had killed at least 20 million people, suffered at least 10 billions of dollars in the world economy and turned the life of billions.
Last year, the Associated Press noted that the Chinese government froze significant interior and international efforts to retrace the origins of the virus in the first weeks of the epidemic in 2020 and which it may be missing the first opportunities to investigate the start of COVID-19.
American president Donald Trump has long blamed the emergence of the coronavirus on a laboratory accident in China, while an analysis of American intelligence revealed that there was not enough evidence to prove the theory.
Chinese officials have repeatedly rejected the idea that the pandemic could have started in a laboratory, saying that the search for its origins should be carried out in other countries.
Last September, the researchers focused on a short list of animals which, according to them, could have disseminated Covid-19 to humans, in particular raccoon dogs, civic cats and bamboo rats.
