WHO feeling the Covid heat
The World Health Organisation is facing renewed demands for an answer to a key question about the coronavirus pandemic: how did it begin?
United States President Joe Biden this week set a 90-day deadline for US intelligence agencies to come ‘‘closer to a definitive conclusion’’ on the origins of the coronavirus, and made a new call for an ambitious global investigation, amid a surge in interest in theories that the virus could have leaked from a laboratory.
The WHO, an overstretched United Nations agency responsible for coordinating the international response to the pandemic, is feeling the pressure. But it has few powers to investigate on its own.
WHO emergencies chief Mike Ryan said yesterday the organisation was still consulting with an expert team that visited the virus’s initial epicentre of Wuhan, China, earlier this year, about how to proceed with their investigation.
All hypotheses remained open, he said. He added, however, that ‘‘this whole process is being poisoned by politics’’.
Biden’s statement this week came in the midst of a week-long ministerial meeting that sets the WHO agenda for the year.
US officials at the World Health Assembly meeting in Geneva issued new calls for an international investigation – which Chinese delegates resisted.
One Chinese official said ‘‘China’s part’’ in the WHO’s probe into the virus’s origins
‘‘has been completed’’, and that the investigation should focus elsewhere – an apparent reference to the unsupported Chinese theory that the virus was imported into China, possibly on frozen food.
According to some experts, pushing publicly for further investigation could lead Beijing to close up even more.
Though China does not hold a formal veto at the 194-member assembly, set to conclude tomorrow, it wields enormous influence. It has successfully blocked the inclusion of Taiwan by the body for years.
Before last year’s assembly, a proposal put forward by Australia for a full, independent investigation into the origins of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, met strong opposition from China. It was replaced by a compromise: a joint China-WHO study.
The China-WHO investigators released a report in March that focused on the idea of ‘‘zoonotic’’ spread from a bat through another animal to humans, dismissing the idea it could have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as ‘‘extremely unlikely’’. The expert
team said the idea that the virus could have been imported on frozen food was more worthy of investigation.
The report’s conclusion drew a rare rebuke from WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who said the assessment of the possibility that the virus was introduced to humans through a laboratory incident was not ‘‘extensive enough’’.
Under the Trump Administration, the US-WHO relationship became openly hostile during the pandemic. After Biden took office in
January, the US adopted a more cooperative approach, realigning itself with the WHO and backing some of its key efforts, such as the vaccine-sharing programme Covax.
At the assembly, the US released a statement, co-signed with 13 other countries, that called for a ‘‘transparent and independent analysis and evaluation, free from interference and undue influence, of the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic’’.
China has shown little sign of backing down, however, with Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian saying that the United States ‘‘does not care about facts and truth.’’
Even if the assembly backs a motion for a broader investigation, China could simply opt out.
‘‘The WHO simply has no power to require China to allow it on to its territory or to hand over data and specimen samples as well as genomic sequencing information,’’ said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
However, while the push against China has bipartisan support in the US, few other nations appear as eager for a fight.
At a WHO briefing yesterday, officials said that while they welcomed offers of aid from member countries, they wanted to keep the focus on scientific analysis. ‘‘Let the scientists be scientists,’’ said Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the WHO’s emerging disease and zoonosis unit.