Morrison repeats call for virus probe

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has repeated his call for a transparent investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, with the nation’s two largest cities again in lockdown to halt the spread of the Delta variant.

“The world deserves answers,” Morrison said after a meeting of the cabinet with state leaders. “Those who have lost their lives and their livelihoods, they deserve answers. Australia will continue to ask the questions to get those answers.”

Morrison’s renewed call for an investigation may further damage Australia’s fraught relationship with China, which has been in free-fall for more than a year after calling for independent investigators to be allowed into Wuhan to probe the virus’s origins. Since then, Beijing has implemented a range of trade reprisals against Australian goods including coal, wine and barley measures that have been described by President Joe Biden’s administration as “economic coercion.”

World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called on China to co-operate in a second phase of studying the origins of the coronavirus, particularly sharing raw data from the early days of the pandemic. While an earlier mission that included Chinese scientists found the virus probably spread from bats to humans via another animal, the WHO asked for a further probe into an unlikely hypothesis that the virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.

Morrison’s comments come as the pandemic continues to rage across Asia, fuelled by the spread of the Delta variant.

Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, surpassed India in new daily cases last week, while Australia’s two most populous cities, Sydney and Melbourne are in lockdown to battle fresh outbreaks, threatening to stall an economic rebound.