‘Premature to rule out Covid-19 lab leak’

BERLIN: The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledged that it was premature to rule out a potential link between the Covid-19 pandemic and a laboratory leak, and he said on Thursday that he is asking China to be more transparent as scientists search for the origin of the coronavirus.

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said getting access to raw data had been a challenge for the international team that travelled to China earlier this year to investigate the source of Covid-19. The first human cases were identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Tedros told reporters that the UN health agency based in Geneva is “actually asking China to be transparent, open and cooperate, especially on the information, raw data that we asked for at the early days of the pandemic”.

He said there had been a “premature push” to rule out the theory that the virus might have escaped from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan - undermining the WHO’S own March report, which concluded that a laboratory leak was “extremely unlikely”. “I was a lab technician myself, I’m an immunologist, and I have worked in the lab, and lab accidents happen,” Tedros said. “It’s common.”

WHO: More dangerous variants could take hold

The WHO’S emergency committee warned that more dangerous variants were expected to spread around the world, making it harder to halt the pandemic.

Also, the WHO reported that Covid-19 deaths climbed last week after nine weeks of decline. The world body recorded over 55,000 fatalities.

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