Mike Ryan’s statements followed that week when US President Joe Biden asked US intelligence agencies to “redouble efforts” to try to explain the origin of the new coronavirus, and demanded a report within 90 days.
“We would like everyone to share, if they can, the politics of science,” said an Irish expert, who complained that in the past few days there was information in the media “with very little news or real evidence.”
“Each country is free to defend its own theories of origin,” he said, warning that there is a need for space to work and that “the current situation” puts WHO in a difficult position to find answers.
The US President’s initiative revived the theory that the coronavirus could have originated in a virology laboratory in Wuhan, a city in central China where the first cases of Covid-19 occurred at the end of 2019, despite the fact that experts from the WHO mission in China emphasized that it had year this hypothesis was the least likely.
After a trip to an Asian country that faced bureaucratic hurdles from the Chinese side, these experts concluded that the most likely hypothesis for the origin of the coronavirus was a wild animal, which has yet to be confirmed, from which it was transmitted to humans by one or more intermediate species.
Mike Ryan said today that WHO and Member States are considering different experts to participate in the next phase of the coronavirus investigation, but unlike the 90 days required for Biden, he stressed that “it will take a lot of missions to find out if you ever- someday you can handle it. “
The Director of Emergency Situations recalled that WHO keeps all theories on the table (although some are considered more credible than others), but has ensured that learning them requires a “positive climate, a process driven by solidarity.”
“Politics complicate the task, let scientists keep working,” added epidemiologist Maria van Kerkhove, technical lead for covid-19 response at WHO, who asked everyone to properly guide their expectations about the origins of HIV and coronavirus.
The covid-19 pandemic has caused at least 3,513,088 deaths worldwide, resulting in more than 168.9 million infections, according to a report by French agency AFP.
In Portugal, 17,023 people have died of 847,604 confirmed infections, according to the latest bulletin from the Directorate General of Health.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus discovered at the end of 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
