WHO accused of abandoning its research on covid origins

The World Health Organization (WHO) is abandoning its planned "phase two" of research regarding the origins of COVID-19. According to the organization, the research has ceased given the global policy and challenges of conducting biomedical research. It was the journal Nature who announced that WHO "has quietly shelved the second phase of its much-anticipated scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

As recalled by Just the News, several employees of the medical agency made a trip in January 2021 to Wuhan, China. The goal of the trip was to learn more about the origins of the virus, especially about operations at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a coronavirus medical research center near where the first outbreak occurred.

Trip to Wuhan

During the trip, the team said they had almost completely ruled out the rumor that the virus had originally escaped from that facility. Instead, they said, the pandemic had been caused by transmission of the virus that had evolved and mutated from affecting only bats to being able to affect and transmit amongst humans as well.

However, the WHO had not yet concluded its investigation and announced that it would be resumed, until now. WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove explained to Nature that the organization had dismissed the second phase: "The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins," she said.

However, the medical expert explained to Nature that scientists are still investigating to try to answer several questions raised by the initial cases of the coronavirus reported in Wuhan. However, the origin of the virus will remain an unsolved mystery because, as Maria Van Kerkhove said, "too much time has passed to gather some of the data needed to pinpoint where the virus originated."

WHO's response

Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, chief epidemiologist at the World Health Organization, denied Wednesday that research into the origins of covid in China has been abandoned. "This is a reporting error that is really worrying because it is causing some headlines that are inaccurate. I think we need to make it perfectly clear that the WHO has not abandoned the study of the origins of covid-19. We have not. And we will not," she maintained at a press conference from Geneva, Switzerland.