The World Health Organization Chief encouraged China on Thursday to reveal its knowledge regarding the virus’s ancestry and stated that until that time, all theories remained open even though it has been more than three years since COVID-19 first surfaced.
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus responded to a query concerning the virus’s origin by saying, you cannot declare this or that without complete access to the material that China has. “Every theory is on the table.”
We have been requesting China’s cooperation in this because that is the WHO’s position. If they did that, he said, “then we would know what happened or how it began.”
Last month, Chinese researchers briefly published information from the early stages of the COVID outbreak to an international database.
The first documented COVID pandemic was discovered at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, China, where more than 1,000 environmental and animal samples were collected in January 2020.
The information suggested that raccoon dogs were “the most likely conduits” of the disease, according to a group of international researchers. Environmental samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, contained DNA from a variety of animal species, including raccoon dogs.
However, researchers from the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention have refuted the conclusions of the multinational team in a non-peer-reviewed article that was published this week in Nature magazine.
They claimed that the samples did not show that the animals were afflicted.
Even if they tested positive for COVID, the animals could have contracted the virus from people since they were captured one month after the market saw the first human-to-human transmission.
