World still in the dark on Covid

After 2.8 million deaths and 127 million infections, the last thing the world needed was another inconclusive report on the origins of COVID-19. But that is what WHO investigators have delivered in their final account of how the virus emerged. The outcome shows the abysmal failure of the WHO in dealing with the crisis, and China’s unwillingness to allow access to the truth. As US Secretary of State Tony Blinken said after early copies of the 319-page document were circulated: “We’ve got real concerns about the methodology and the process … including the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped write it.”

The report does not come close to explaining the emergence of a pathogen that has devastated so many nations. And until China provides the data needed, firmer conclusions will be difficult, pandemic experts agree. While not ruling it out entirely, the report lent credence to China’s denial of the Trump administration’s contention that the pandemic was most likely the result of a lab accident at the Wuhan Virology Institute. Such an accident, investigators said, was “extremely unlikely” because there was no record that any laboratory had been working with either the new coronavirus or a closely related virus. The investigators said they did not consider a hypothesis that the virus was deliberately engineered in a lab for release, because analyses of the genome had ruled that out. They concluded the virus was most likely spread from bats and then to humans via another small mammal species such as mink, raccoon dogs or ferret badgers, either on a farm or in the wild. That scenario, they said, has been seen in several viruses.

The team recommended more testing of possible animal sources. It also suggested further consideration of respiratory illness data from the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019. Beijing has claimed the US delegation to the Games might have brought the virus to Wuhan.

But the main thrust of the report, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus conceded, was to avoid reaching definitive conclusions about how the pandemic started and spread. That failure stems from the early days of 2020, when Dr Tedros went out of his way to praise Beijing’s handling of the pandemic, in a way that bore little relation to the truth.

Beijing’s furious reaction when Scott Morrison sensibly proposed a global probe into what caused the pandemic was telling. Such an investigation remains as much in China’s interests as those of the rest of the world, to guard against future pandemics.