The WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), a panel of 27 independent, international, multidisciplinary experts, today published its report on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.
www.who.int
China continues to withhold key information.
...“While most available and accessible published scientific evidence” supports that SARS-CoV-2 came to humans from bats or an undetermined “intermediate” species that became infected with a bat coronavirus, the report stresses that the panel “is not currently able to conclude exactly when, where and how SARS-CoV-2 first entered the human population.”
Convened in November 2021, WHO’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), which had 27 independent members from 24 countries, relied on published scientific papers, the intelligence agency assessments it could obtain, government reports, and interviews with scientists as well as journalists in China who covered the earliest cases. It wasn’t enough, said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a press conference today to announce the report. “We continue to appeal to China and any other country that has information about the origins of COVID-19 to share that information openly in the interests of protecting the world from future pandemics.”
...Proponents of the natural origin hypothesis point to studies that showed how early cases of COVID-19 clustered around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where environmental sampling by Chinese scientists after the outbreak surfaced found genetic fragments of both SARS-CoV-2 and mammals susceptible to the virus in the same stalls. “[T]he most compelling evidence of a possible spillover from animals to humans comes from the independent metagenomic data analysis,” the report says. Lab-leak advocates, however, insist that infected people could have just as easily brought the virus to the market.
The report faults the governments of the United States and Germany for not sharing more information from their intelligence communities but reserves its strongest criticism for China. Records from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which studied bat coronaviruses, or another virology lab run in the city by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, could hold crucial clues, it said....
Although members of an earlier probe of the pandemic’s origin organized by WHO visited those facilities in 2021, SAGO says there still has not been sufficient access to those labs’ staff health records to examine whether someone might have developed COVID-19 prior to the first known cases. SAGO also says it still lacks results of audits of records from the labs, and reports of biosafety and biosecurity breaches.
The report says China has not shared SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences from 508 viral samples obtained from Wuhan COVID-19 patients in early 2020 and has not provided “upstream” information about farms that raised animals sold at Huanan and other Wuhan markets, or the traders who handled them....
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In hindsight, trump's withdrawal, several months before the outbreak in China, of the CDC epidemiologist embedded with that country's version of the CDC, was unfortunate, to say the least.
www.reuters.com
