WHO says China has more Covid-19 origin data: ‘We need to know’
- The health agency’s chief demanded that Beijing share all relevant information, saying that if it does, ‘we will know what happened’
- More than 3 years after the pandemic started, heated debate on its origins continues to rage
The World Health Organization said on Thursday it was sure that China had far more data that could shed light on the origins of Covid-19, demanding that Beijing immediately share all relevant information.
“Without full access to the information that China has … all hypotheses are on the table,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters in Geneva.
“That’s WHO’s position and that’s why we have been asking China to be cooperative on this,” he said, insisting that if Beijing does provide the missing data “we will know what happened or how it started”.
More than three years after Covid-19 first surfaced, heated debate around the origins of the pandemic is still raging.
03:18
Beijing rejects US agency report saying Covid-19 likely emerged from Chinese lab leak
The issue has proved divisive for the scientific community and even different US government agencies, drawn between a theory that the virus jumped naturally to humans from animals and one maintaining that the virus likely leaked from a Wuhan lab – a claim that China has angrily denied.