WHO team probing coronavirus origins in China pushes back as report faces global criticism
- The experts didn’t have unfettered access to raw material or the lab in Wuhan that has become central to the controversy
- But the WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19 defended the study, saying the scientists were never pressured to remove critical elements from the report
Six weeks after that trip, the working group this week delivered an analysis that laid out four possible scenarios and recommended next steps for digging deeper to find the pandemic’s genesis. The 123-page report, and a nearly 200-page supplement, was immediately engulfed by criticism, with a dozen nations including the US, the UK and Japan questioning its structure and insights.
The most unexpected detractor was WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who helped negotiate the details of the trip and agreed to the scope of the work back in July. He said the theory that the virus escaped via a laboratory accident needed to be more thoroughly vetted, a hypothesis that has been vigorously denied by Beijing.
“There’s obviously a lot of politics,” said John Mackenzie, an Australian virologist who led a 2003 WHO-convened mission in China to study the origins of Sars, leaving him well-versed on the delicacies of undertaking such a study. “He should be standing by his committee’s report.”
“I just find it very strange that he’s demeaning it and he’s deflecting from it,” said Mackenzie, an emeritus professor at Curtin University in Perth who serves on the WHO’s emergency committee for Covid-19.
It’s not that controversy was unexpected: the mission was fraught from the start, with China resisting the scientists for months before relenting to a team of experts that comprised of a local expert for every foreign one.