The WHO director-general said both zoonotic spillover and lab leak hypotheses ’must remain on the table,’ and urged Beijing to share data.
A panel of World Health Organization (WHO) experts said they were not able to draw a conclusion on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic as the Chinese regime is still withholding information.
In a report published on Friday, the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), a 27-strong expert panel established by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in November 2021, called on “governments—especially those where the earliest human cases were confirmed,” to share information.
“As things stand, all hypotheses must remain on the table, including zoonotic spillover and lab leak,” Ghebreyesus said at a press briefing.
“We continue to appeal to China and any other country that has information about the origins of COVID-19 to share that information openly, in the interests of protecting the world from future pandemics,” he added.
According to the WHO, between December 2019 and May 2023, COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, led to more than 7 million deaths globally.
The first known cases came from Wuhan in central China but patient zero has never been identified.
Local health officials first suspected the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan City to be the source of the disease, saying that “most” of the initial patients were linked to the market, but a paper published in the Lancet in January 2020 said almost a third of the initial cases were not connected to the market.
Wuhan also hosts the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which received more than $1 million U.S. funding to experiment on bat coronaviruses. This and the Chinese regime’s cover up of early outbreaks, along with other circumstantial evidence, has fueled suspicion that the virus was leaked from the institute.
In May 2023, George Gao, who headed the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) during the COVID-19 pandemic, told the BBC that Chinese officials had investigated WIV to find out whether SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from the lab, and found no wrongdoing.
By Lily Zhou
