GENEVA, Switzerland — The head of the
World Health Organization met Chinese Premier
Li Keqiang on Saturday for talks on Covid-19,
including on the stalled investigation into the pandemic's origins.
اضافة اعلان
WHO director-general
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, visiting Beijing for the 2022 Winter Olympics, posted a picture on
Twitter of the pair sitting with officials in a meeting room.
"Pleased to meet with Premier Li
Keqiang. We discussed COVID-19 and the need for an aggressive effort on vaccine
equity this year to vaccinate 70 percent of all populations," Tedros said.
"We also discussed the need for
stronger collaboration on COVID-19 virus origins, rooted in science and
evidence.
"I welcomed his support to strengthen
WHO and discussion about a pandemic accord to advance global
preparedness," he added.
A Chinese government statement on the
meeting said Li called for solidarity, cooperation, and more understanding
among nations to defeat the pandemic.
On tracing the origins of the virus, it said
Tedros adhered to scientific principles and opposed politicizing the process.
Lab-leak theory
Tedros is paying his first visit to China
since January 2020, in the weeks after the first cases of COVID-19 were
recorded in Wuhan.
More than 370 million cases and 5.6 million
deaths have since been reported to the WHO — figures it says are an
underestimate.
Understanding where the SARS-CoV-2 virus
that causes COVID came from is seen as key to preventing future pandemics.
After much delay, a WHO team of
international experts went to Wuhan in January 2021 to look into the origins of
the virus in cooperation with their Chinese counterparts.
Their March 2021 joint report concluded that
the most likely hypothesis was that the virus jumped from bats to humans via an
intermediate animal.
They deemed a theory that it may have
escaped from Wuhan's virology laboratories "extremely unlikely".
However, that investigation faced harsh
criticism for lacking transparency and access, and for not evaluating the
lab-leak theory seriously.
WHO 'won't stop' searching
Beijing has baulked at calls for further
investigation on the ground, and has not provided access to raw data from the
Wuhan laboratories that could potentially help confirm or rule out a
connection.
The Geneva-based WHO has created a new team
of scientists in a bid to revive the stalled probe, and to investigate other
pathogens that could potentially spur future pandemics.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's technical lead
on COVID-19, said the team were examining the framework needed to study any
emerging pathogen; the current understanding of COVID-19's origins; and fresh
evidence from studies conducted since the March 2021 report.
"What they are looking at are the early
epidemiologic studies. What do we know about those earliest suspected and known
cases that were reported in China?" she told a press conference in
Geneva on Tuesday.
"Many more studies are necessary to
really understand the emergence of this virus.”
"We, as WHO, won't stop until we
exhaust all avenues to better understand this."
Read more Region and World
.jpg)
.jpg)
