COVID LIKELY DID NOT ORIGINATE FROM WUHAN LAB: WHO PROBE
WUHAN: The coronavirus is unlikely to have leaked from a Chinese lab and is more likely to have jumped to humans from an animal, a World Health Organization expert said on Tuesday.
WHO food safety and animal diseases expert Peter Ben Embarek made the assessment at the end of a visit to the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where a team of scientists is investigating the possible origins of Covid-19. The first cases were discovered in the city in December 2019.
“Our initial findings suggest that the introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway,” Embarek said. “However, the findings suggest that the laboratory incidents hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus to the human population,” he added.
The coronavirus is unlikely to have leaked from a Chinese lab and is more likely to have jumped to humans from an animal, a World Health Organization (WHO) expert said on Tuesday.
The WHO’s food safety and animal diseases expert Peter Ben Embarek made the assessment at the end of a visit to the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where a team of scientists is investigating the possible origins of the coronavirus. The first cases of the disease were discovered in the city in December 2019.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has collected extensive virus samples, leading to allegations that it may have caused the original outbreak by leaking the virus into the surrounding community. China has strongly rejected that possibility and has promoted other theories that the virus may have originated elsewhere. The team is considering several theories for how the disease first ended up in humans.
“Our initial findings suggest that the introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway and one that will require more studies and more specific, targeted research,” Embarek said.
“However, the findings suggest that the laboratory incidents hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus to the human population,” Embarek said. The WHO’s probe team draws on experts from 10 countries.
‘Pfizer jab can neutralise variants from UK, SA’
The Covid-19 vaccine co-developed by Pfizer and BioNTech can neutralise variants of the coronavirus that were first reported in the UK and South Africa, a study suggests. The research, published in the journal Nature Medicine, noted that the vaccine is effective against coronavirus variants carrying the N501Y and E484K mutations.
In the study, scientist PeiYong Shi and his colleagues engineered combinations of mutations found in circulating variants and tested a panel of human sera from 20 participants.
Commenting on the research, virologist Lawrence Young from the University of Warwick in the UK, said the findings confirm previous studies indicating that the Pfizer vaccine is likely to be effective against the UK variant.
US reports more than 2.93mn cases in kids
More than 2.93 million children in the United States have been diagnosed with Covid-19 since the onset of the pandemic, according to the latest data of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children’s Hospital Association. About 117,500 new Covid-19 cases in children were reported last week ending February 4, according to data from the AAP.