The head of the World Health Organisation told the Financial Times he was ready to send a new mission of experts to China to investigate the origins of Covid-19.
“We’re pressing China to give full access, and we are asking countries to raise it during their bilateral meetings — (to urge Beijing) to co-operate,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the FT.
He said the WHO had already written to China asking “to give us information “ and for the organisation to send a team “if they allow us to do so”.
The international community has been unable to determine with certainty the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The first cases were detected at the end of 2019 in Wuhan, China, suggesting two opposing theories: an escape from a laboratory in the city where such viruses were being studied or an intermediate animal that infected people at a local market.
A team of specialists led by the WHO and accompanied by Chinese colleagues investigated China in early 2021.
In a joint report, they favored the hypothesis that the virus had been transmitted by the intermediary animals from a bat to a human, possibly at a market.
