The WHO had said in its initial assessment in 2021 that it was “highly unlikely” that the new coronavirus could jump from a laboratory to humans
Release Date – 06:20 AM, Thu – 22 June 23
London: The World Health Organization (WHO) should never have refuted laboratory leak theories about the origins of the Covid pandemic, says one of the top virologists on the UN health agency’s panel, Professor Marion Koopmans.
The WHO said in its initial assessment in 2021 that it was “extremely unlikely” that the new coronavirus could have jumped from a laboratory to humans.
Koopmans, who heads the Division of Virus Science at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, is one of 12 people investigating the emergence of the pandemic on behalf of the WHO.
According to the “Daily Mail”, Koopmans said in the BBC podcast “Fever: Finding the Origin of the New Coronavirus” that the theory that the virus escaped from the secret laboratory in Wuhan can never be ruled out.
“We shouldn’t be doing that,” she added.
In January 2021, a team of experts from the World Health Organization spent four weeks in China to investigate whether Covid-19 was the result of a laboratory leak.
The agency announced that “all hypotheses are on the table” and “we have not yet found the source of the virus, and we must continue to follow science as we do now and do everything possible.”
But the global health body ruled that the natural origin theory was the most likely – listing the leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as “highly unlikely” and backing the frozen food origin theory.
China, on the other hand, said the virus started at a research facility in Maryland, US, or imported frozen food packaging.
Meanwhile, Koopmans said she has not ruled out the theory of frozen food and a lab leak.
“In my opinion, none of them are excluded,” she said.
Asked whether including the frozen food theory in the final report would compromise the WHO’s mission, Koopmans said: “I don’t think so.”
“Again, as a scientist, looking at the literature and looking at what’s possible, I don’t think we should throw it away because it’s politically motivated either.”
In May, Dr Gao Fu, the former head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, also said that the theory that Covid-19 was the result of a laboratory leak should not be underestimated. When Covid first emerged in Wuhan, High directed China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
“You can always doubt anything. That’s science. Don’t rule anything out,” Gao said in the same BBC podcast.
From the outset, China has dismissed any suggestion that the disease could have originated in the Wuhan lab.
More than two years after a pandemic that infected more than 763 million people and claimed more than 6.9 million lives worldwide, the origins of Covid-19 remain unclear.
