The World Health Organization is responsible for investigating how the Covid-19-19 pandemic released its final report on Friday, reaching an unsatisfactory conclusion: Scientists are still uncertain how the worst health emergency in a century began.
Marietjie Venter, the group’s chairman, said in a press conference that most scientific data supported the assumption that the new coronavirus jumped from animals to humans.
It was also the first panel of experts to investigate the origins of the pandemic in 2021, when scientists concluded that the virus could be transmitted from bats to humans through another mediating animal. At the time, he said the lab leak was “extremely impossible”.
Venter said after more than three years of work, whose panel of experts has not been able to obtain the necessary data to assess whether Covid-19 is the result of a laboratory accident, despite repeated requests for hundreds of genetic sequences and more detailed biosafety information provided to the Chinese government.
“So, this assumption cannot be investigated or excluded,” she said. “Based on a political point of view, without being supported by science, it is considered very speculative.”
She said the 27-member group did not reach a consensus. One member resigned earlier this week, and three other members requested that their names be removed from the report.
Venter said there is no evidence that Covid-19 has been manipulated in the lab, nor any indication that the virus has been spreading anywhere outside China by December 2019.
“Until more scientific data are available, the origins of SARS-COV-2 entering human populations will remain uncertain,” Venter said.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said determining how Covid started was a “moral order”, noting that the virus killed at least 20 million people, killed at least $100 trillion from the global economy and extended billions of lives.
Last year, the Associated Press found that the Chinese government frozen meaningful domestic and international efforts in the first few weeks of the 2020 outbreak to track the origins of the virus, and who itself may have missed an early opportunity to investigate how Covid-19 began.
U.S. President Donald Trump has long blamed the coronavirus on a laboratory accident in China, and U.S. intelligence analysis found there was not enough evidence to prove the theory.
Chinese officials have repeatedly refuted the idea that the pandemic could have started in the lab, saying searches for its origins should be conducted in other countries.
Last September, researchers included a short list of 19 animals they thought might have listed together, including raccoon dogs, civet cats and bamboo mice.
