WHO report on origins of Covid to be unveiled “very likely” next week

“The report is just not ready,” World Health Organization (WHO) spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said at a UN press briefing in Geneva. “What we are hearing from members of the mission is that the report will most likely be released next week,” he added.

The publication of this report is eagerly awaited. Initially, the WHO had said that the team of experts, which stayed in Wuhan for 4 weeks, would quickly release a preliminary report before the final report. This draft preliminary document was finally abandoned in February, but without any real explanation.

Then the director of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced on March 5 that the report would be published in the week of March 15, promising to give the first to member states “before its publication” and to expose them to them. conclusions.

The WHO was instructed by a resolution adopted in May 2020 by its members to study the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that gives rise to Covid-19, in collaboration with Chinese experts. The selection of specialists took a long time, and the experts, recognized by their peers in their various specialties, could not go to China until January, after long discussions between Beijing and the WHO.

During a long press conference in Wuhan at the end of their mission, WHO experts had exposed the different working hypotheses on how the virus that causes Covid-19 passed from animal to animal. the man. They had appeared to rule out the hypothesis that the virus may have escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology, deeming it highly unlikely. But the director general of the WHO had shortly after rectified the situation by affirming that “all the assumptions remain on the table” to explain the origin of the pandemic.