WHO investigation into COVID-19 origins stalled without access to Chinese data
Abigail Adcox
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The World Health Organization denied reports Wednesday that it abandoned an investigation into the origins of COVID-19, though it admitted that the agency’s efforts have been stalled due to a lack of cooperation from China.
WHO officials said they will continue to push for answers as to how the virus that spurred a global pandemic first emerged in 2020, but contended that they need China to provide access to its labs and data to move its investigation forward. Several congressional committees in the U.S. are spearheading investigations into the origins of the virus, particularly looking into a theory that it was the result of a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
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“We will continue to ask for countries to de-politicize this work, but we need cooperation from our colleagues in China to advance this,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for COVID-19, in a media briefing Wednesday. “We haven’t stopped any work. We will not stop until we understand the origins of this. And it is becoming increasingly difficult because the more time that passes, the more difficult it becomes to really understand what happened in those early stages of the pandemic.”
Kerkhove disputed a recent report from Nature that claimed the agency had “quietly shelved the second phase” of its COVID-19 investigation, quoting Kerkhove as saying, “there is no phase two.” Researchers suggested that there was little the WHO could do without cooperation from China.
The WHO’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens, which was charged with looking into the origins, called for last June the auditing of Chinese labs close to where the first cases of COVID-19 were identified in Wuhan, as well as a seafood market that studies have suggested could be the source of the outbreak. The WHO had previously sent scientists in 2021 to interview people from research facilities and a seafood market in Wuhan, but cooperation from Beijing has since unraveled.
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WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday that he recently sent a letter to a top Chinese official asking for cooperation in the investigation.
The international community has raised questions about the reliability of China’s COVID-19 data since the onset of the pandemic. In early 2020, countries scrambled to contain the spread of COVID-19 after first being detected in China. Health officials blamed China for downplaying key information at the beginning of the pandemic, giving countries less time to respond.