WHO says this may be ‘last chance’ to find COVID origin

The first human cases of COVID-19 were reported in December 2019 in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. China has repeatedly dismissed theories that the virus leaked from one of its laboratories and said no more visits were needed.

Selected from more than 700 applications, the 26 proposed members of the group have expertise in a range of areas, from epidemiology to biosafety, the WHO said on Wednesday. These include Marion Koopman of the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, Christian Drosten of the Institute of Virology in Charité, Berlin, and Yungui Yang, deputy director of the Beijing Institute of Genomics.

“Understanding where new pathogens come from is essential to preventing future outbreaks with pandemic and pandemic potential, and this requires extensive expertise,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote in the statement.

Earlier this year, a joint WHO-China mission found that the coronavirus may be transmitted from bats to humans through other animals. Although the team considered the lab-leak phenomenon the least likely hypothesis, the WHO director called for further research.

US President Joe Biden has criticized China for hindering efforts to understand the origins of SARS-CoV-2, while China has accused the US and its allies of blaming it for a pandemic that has caused a global pandemic. But it has taken the lives of about 5 million people.

Tedros has said that scientists still lack raw data on possible infections in late 2019. WHO has proposed audits of laboratories and research centers in Wuhan, where the first cases were identified, as well as studies on animals, people and the environment. Which may have played a role in the emergence of the coronavirus.

The new study is bound to face fresh hurdles. Beijing has said it would reject calls for an investigation into whether the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high-security facility on the outskirts of the city that was conducting coronavirus research.