WHO invites the US to share information on the origin of covid-19

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday that it had ordered the United States and other countries to share information about the origin of the covid, after US officials pointed to a leak in a Chinese laboratory as the start of the pandemic.

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The origins of covid-19 have once again aroused international attention in recent days.

“If a country has information about the origins of the pandemic, it is essential that this information be shared with the WHO and the international scientific community,” declared the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, at a conference ordinary press.

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It is not a question of “pointing out the guilty”, he said, but of enable “to advance our understanding of how the pandemic began so that we can prevent, prepare for, and respond to future epidemics and pandemics”.

The director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, said this week in an interview with Fox News that the origin of the covid-19 is probably due to an “incident in a laboratory in Wuhan”, two days after the Department of Energy offered a similar thesis.

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Questioned about the matter, the person in charge of the response to the WHO covid, Maria Van Kerkhove, explained that the agency had requested information from senior officials of the US representation to the United Nations in Geneva, in addition to the Department itself.

“At the moment, we don’t have access to those reports or to the data that would make it possible to produce those reports,” he said.

AFP