Covid-19: “Whodunnit?”

The World Health Organisation ( WHO) held a Global Health Summit last week via satellite link epitomising the plight the world has been thrown into since the start of last year. Gone are the once popular pilgrimages by Health Ministers from around the world for its annual conferences in the salubrious Swiss city of Geneva.

The WHO summit follows two previous similar leaders meetings, viz., the Riyadh summit and the G-20 summit on mapping out a common global understanding in combating the virus and in helping the economic recovery of the world economy, but that anticipated solidarity has not been totally forthcoming. Western nations in particular have been slow off the block to pass their advanced vaccine know-how and supplies to the economically developing countries.

The Chinese President addressing the summit called for a "vision of building a global community of health for all”, and added that the pandemic was a reminder that humanity must rise and fall together. He championed the cause of the developing countries as well.

He also referred to enhancing the capacity of monitoring and early warning mechanisms, something China has been accused of neglecting by delaying to alert the world of the outbreak of the virus. It is now all but established that the virus broke out from the Wuhan Province of China. The common theory is that it broke out from a meat market but this theory has been challenged by recent reports that it may even have leaked from a laboratory in the same province experimenting with viruses.

China has vehemently denied the latter. Now, the US President has ordered its intelligence agency to find out the origin to COVID-19. Neither China, nor the WHO has yet to say definitively, 18 months on, how this virus broke out in the first place. That in itself is a frightening thought. Because - it can happen again!