BEIJING – A World Health Organization team investigating the origins of Covid-19 plans to scrap an interim report on its recent mission to China amid mounting tensions between Beijing and Washington over the study and a call from an international group of scientists for a new probe.
The group of twenty scientists is calling for an open letter on Thursday for a new international study. They say the WHO team that completed a mission to Wuhan – the Chinese city where the first known cases were found – last month had insufficient access to adequately investigate possible sources of the new coronavirus, including whether it disappeared from a lab.
Their appeal is because the US – which recently reversed a decision to leave the WHO – is lobbying for more transparency in the investigation, saying it is waiting to study the report on the Wuhan mission, and urging China. release all relevant data, including the first confirmed infections in December 2019, and possibly earlier ones.
Beijing, meanwhile, is pushing for similar WHO-led missions to other countries, including the US, to investigate whether the virus could originate outside of China and spread to Wuhan via freezer packs.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Feb. 12 that the team would publish an interim report summarizing the Wuhan mission, possibly the following week, with a full report weeks later. But that summary report has yet to be published, and the WHO team is now scrapping that plan, said Peter Ben Embarek, the food safety scientist who led the team. The WHO team plans to publish a summary along with the full final report, he said. That final report “will be published in the coming weeks and will contain the main findings,” said a WHO spokesman.