An investigation into the origins of Covid-19 has been quietly shelved by the World Health Organisation (WHO), it has emerged.
Since the start of the pandemic, there has been speculation that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China, which had been collecting and manipulating bat viruses.
An initial inquiry by the WHO concluded in 2021 that Covid-19 emerged from an animal spillover event, but it was later shown that investigators had been forced to report a lab leak was unlikely to avoid arguments with China.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director general, later acknowledged it had been premature to rule out a leak from laboratories in Wuhan, and called for a more thorough inquiry.
However, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told the journal Nature that plans had changed, citing difficulties in conducting studies in China.
“The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins,” she said.
Investigators had asked China to be more transparent about its lab data, but the country rejected the proposals, particularly plans to look into lab breaches.
Dr Van Kerkhove said that the WHO had repeatedly tried to engage with Chinese officials and organisations.
“It’s really a deep frustration,” she added.
Prof Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist from Rutgers University in the US, has fought to uncover the truth behind the pandemic. He said that the WHO had “failed utterly” in its responsibility to find the origins of Covid-19.
“It’s fortunate that the US Congress is beginning an investigation of the origin of the pandemic that killed more than 15 million,” he said.
Last October, a US Senate committee report found that the pandemic was “more likely than not” the result of a laboratory accident.
Committee members found there were “a number of anomalies” in the emergence of Covid-19 naturally compared with other spillover diseases, such as Sars and Mers.
Within six months of the Sars epidemic in 2002, scientists had discovered the species behind the outbreak. Yet despite widespread searching, a candidate for Covid-19 has never been found.
However, WIV had collected more than 220 Sars-related coronaviruses, at least 100 of which were never made public. Staff were photographed wearing inadequate levels of personal protective equipment while handing bats.
There is also evidence that WIV scientists were engaging in advanced coronavirus research that was designed to predict and prevent future pandemics by collecting, characterising and experimenting on “high-risk” coronavirus.
WIV also submitted a proposal in 2018 seeking funding to engineer coronaviruses to increase their ability to infect human cells.
The committee also said it was “noteworthy” that the earliest variants of Covid-19 were already well adapted for human-to-human transmission.
Shi Zhengli, a senior coronavirus researcher from WIV, has admitted that the team infected humanised mice with chimeric Sars-related coronavirus, but has never published the results.
Source: Telegraph