Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Emergency Program, speaks at a press conference on the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Geneva, Switzerland.
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
A senior World Health Organization official said Friday that investigations into the origins of Covid-19 are “poisoned by politics.”
US President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that he had ordered intelligence agencies “to prepare a report on their most recent analysis of the origins of Covid-19, including whether it was from human contact with an infected animal or from.” emerged from a laboratory accident. ” “”
The WHO has been under increasing pressure from US and European officials in recent days to re-examine whether the coronavirus could have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China after a previously unpublished US intelligence report came to light , who revealed that three researchers were seeking hospital care for illness with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019.
Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, asked if countries could separate politics from science.
“Putting WHO in a position as it has been instituted is very unfair to the science we want to do and, frankly, puts us in the impossible position as an organization to provide the answers the world wants.” Ryan said at a press conference.
The WHO has been repeatedly accused of allowing the Chinese government to avoid a thorough investigation into the origins of Covid-19, which was first discovered in Wuhan in late 2019. At a Senate hearing earlier this week, Senator John Kennedy, R-La. the White House Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on WHO’s close ties with China.
“Can we agree that the World Health Organization would fall out of his pocket if you turned (Chinese) President Xi Jinping upside down and shook him?” Fauci responded by saying he had no way of knowing China’s influence on the agency.
The hypothesis that Covid-19 originated in a virology lab in Wuhan was initially dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy theory, but has grown in importance in recent weeks.
The majority of intelligence agencies think it is just as plausible that the virus came from a laboratory and an animal. Federal health officials continue to claim that it is more likely that the virus is zoonotic in origin. The CDC website still says, “We know it originally came from an animal, probably a bat.”
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