This was published 2 years ago
‘Lot of rhetoric’: WHO expects China to co-operate with second inquiry into virus origins
London: The World Health Organisation says it expects Beijing to co-operate with its investigations into the origins of COVID-19 despite China blasting any further probes as unnecessary.
WHO originally all but ruled out the possibility that the virus could have leaked from a lab, possibly the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which specialises in studying coronaviruses and bats.
Dr Mike Ryan, the head of WHO’s Public Emergencies Programme, says he expects China to co-operate with investigations into the origins of COVID-19.Credit: AP
That prompted a fierce backlash from the international community, led by the Biden administration, which had defended WHO after accusations of a pro-China bias from the former Trump administration.
WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the investigating team was premature to rule out the hypotheses and that a second study should proceed.
He proposed a second mission which should include new studies in China and lab audits. The Chinese government has said it could not accept that idea, prompting accusations that it has something to hide.
Asked by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age what that meant for the investigations team, Dr Mike Ryan, the head of WHO’s Public Emergencies Programme, said he suspected China would end up co-operating and that WHO was looking forward to hearing from the Chinese about progress made on implementing the new studies.
“We are expecting all countries, all member states of WHO, to co-operate in support of this process and I suspect that we will get that co-operation,” Dr Ryan told a virtual news conference hosted at WHO’s headquarters in Geneva.
“There’s a lot of rhetoric out there at the moment, certainly and all countries … what we want to do for all partners and everybody is calling for this, there’s widespread agreement amongst all of our member states — let’s not politicise the process.
“So we believe we have the basis to move forward. We have a set of studies that can be taken forward, we want to bring together a scientific advisory group on origins to help take that forward, we want to bring members of the international team into that process to maintain continuity with the previous process.
“And we want to reassure our colleagues in China that this process is still and is and has always been driven by science,” he said.
Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne said this week that Australia would “absolutely” be pushing for a second probe. The government’s call for the first inquiry sparked a fierce reaction from Beijing, which imposed billions of dollars’ worth of trade tariffs on Australian goods as a result.
Dr Ryan added that the WHO had never taken sides and was only driven by a desire to put in place whatever measures that could prevent a future pandemic.
He said that could only occur by knowing the origins of COVID-19 which has killed millions of people and plunged billions more into lockdowns, including the two-month shutdown currently affecting Sydney.
The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has said the Delta variant of COVID-19 is as contagious as chickenpox.
WHO experts said they still did not know why the Delta variant was so much more transmissible than the original version which emerged in Wuhan, China, in 2019. A series of studies are under way to try to unlock the answer which could help mitigate its transmission.
Dr Ryan said that because the virus had gotten fitter, it meant that trying to suppress it through measures that worked against previous strains was harder.
“In some senses, we’re all in kindergarten when it comes to this virus — we’re still learning,” he said. “We need to work harder, the virus has got faster.”
He said vaccines, physical distancing, wearing masks and ventilating indoor spaces were still effective against the virus but that these measures had to be executed “more efficiently and more effectively” than ever before.
Get a note direct from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.