WHO CHIEF SAYS DISCUSSED COLLABORATION ON COVID ORIGINS WITH CHINESE PREMIER

Sat 05 February 2022:

The World Health Organization (WHO) chief met with China’s premier to discuss COVID-19, particularly the stalling inquiry into the pandemic’s origins.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Li Keqiang met on Saturday as the origin of the coronavirus strained relations between China and the West.

The WHO director-general, who is in Beijing for the 2022 Winter Olympics, shared a photo of the two sitting in a meeting room with officials on Twitter. Ghebreyesus has already encouraged China to be more open about the virus’s origins by providing more data and information.

“Pleased to meet with Premier Li Keqiang,” Tedros tweeted on Saturday. “We discussed COVID-19 and the need for an aggressive effort on VaccinEquity this year to vaccinate 70 percent of all populations,” he said, referring to the WHO campaign for fair access to vaccines around the world.

“We also discussed the need for stronger collaboration on COVID-19 virus origins, rooted in science and evidence,” he added.

One of the primary mysteries of COVID-19, which has killed over six million people globally, is where, when, and how the virus originated. When the virus first appeared in China in 2019, the US and other countries criticized China for delaying sharing information.

In December, the WHO said Beijing had still not disclosed some early data that might help pinpoint the origins and called for a second phase of an investigation into it.

The WHO’s Scientific Advisory Group on the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) was founded last year, and China was asked to provide raw data to aid any future research. China refused, citing patient privacy laws as a reason.

China has consistently refuted claims that the virus was leaked from a specialist facility in Wuhan, where COVID-19 was first discovered in late 2019.

Last year, a collaborative investigation by China and the WHO all but ruled out the possibility that COVID-19 was created in a lab, stating that the most plausible scenario was that it infected humans spontaneously, most likely through the animal trade.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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