WHO calls natural origin of COVID more likely

COVID-19 is likely of natural rather than laboratory origin, World Health Organization (WHO) Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar said in an interview with the Financial Times, Report informs.

Farrar said he was still open to all hypotheses on Covid’s origins, including an accidental laboratory leak from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, or its transmission from animals being sold in the city’s wet markets. His interpretation of the evidence accumulated over three years suggested that it “is increasingly that actually the natural origin is much more likely”.

“But you can’t ignore the geography, you can’t ignore the center,” he added, referring to the potential leak from labs in Wuhan.

Farrar is open to the idea of a WHO new mission to China to trace Covid’s origins, “if there was a willingness to share all information, and this could be done in a way that will actually shed light on it”. While the health body was criticized early in the pandemic for being too lenient on China, it has increasingly become more vocal in calling on Beijing to share all relevant coronavirus data.

“Every [piece of] information should be shared. And we should get to the bottom of it,” he said, referring to the origins of Covid. But he added: “I’m not sure we will.”

The WHO should be more of a public “conductor” of initiatives to improve global health rather than running them inside the organization, Farrar said.

While coronavirus laid bare tensions over how governments handle global outbreaks of infectious disease, Farrar said the world was “converging in many ways”, citing the problems of drug resistance and non-communicable diseases such as heart disease and obesity. “The issues that affect one country are increasingly going to affect every country.”