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The World Health Organization insisted on Monday that it would do everything it could to find the animal origins of Covid-19, insisting that knowledge was vital to prevent future epidemics.
“We want to know the origin and we will do everything to know the origin,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.
She insisted that the UN health agency was intent on getting to the bottom of the mystery, and urged critics who accused her of handing the reins of the probe to China to stop “politicizing” the issue.
“The position of the WHO is very, very clear. We need to know the origin of this virus, because it can help us prevent future epidemics,” said Tedros.
The United States, which with over 262,000 deaths is the country most affected by the pandemic, has been harshly critical of the WHO’s handling of the crisis and accused it of bowing to China and dragging on to investigate how it began. the epidemic.
Other critics have also expressed concern that the agency may have allowed China to dictate the terms of an international investigation into the origins of the virus, which first surfaced in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year.
Since then, more than 1.46 million people have died and nearly 63 million have been infected around the world.
WHO has been working for months to send a team of international experts, including epidemiologists and animal health specialists, to China to help probe the animal origin of the novel coronavirus pandemic and how the virus first passed to humans .
The organization sent an advanced team to Beijing in July to lay the groundwork for the international investigation.
But it is still unclear when the larger team of scientists would be able to travel to China to begin epidemiological studies to try to identify early human cases and their source of infection.
Last week, WHO emergency chief Michael Ryan said the agency hoped to send the international team to Wuhan “as soon as possible”.
Tedros meanwhile dismissed criticism on Monday for the lack of transparency on the investigation, noting that the team’s expert names and warrant had been made public.
“There is nothing to hide. We want to know the origin. I don’t want to have any confusion about this.”
Scientists initially believed the killer virus passed from animals to humans at a market that sells exotic animals for meat in the city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected late last year.
But experts now think the market may not have been the source of the outbreak, but rather a place where it was amplified.
It is widely believed that the virus originally came from bats, but the intermediate animal host that transmitted it between bats and humans remains unknown.
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