The chief of the World Health Organization (WHO) says it’s a “moral imperative” to find the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused millions of deaths worldwide as Beijing continues to obfuscate sharing crucial data with the world.
Marking three years into the pandemic, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on March 11 that “all hypotheses” about COVID-19 must be explored in order to prevent future outbreaks.
“Understanding #COVID19’s origins and exploring all hypotheses remains: a scientific imperative, to help us prevent future outbreaks [and] a moral imperative, for the sake of the millions of people who died and those who live with #LongCOVID,” he wrote on Twitter.
Tedros said the WHO would continue to push for equitable access to life-saving tools for all countries.
The coalition stated that instead of rolling out vaccines based on need, pharmaceutical companies maximized their profits by selling doses to the richest countries first, leaving billions of people in low- and middle-income countries behind.
“Had the governments listened to the science and shared vaccines equitably with the world, it is estimated that at least 1.3 million lives could have been saved in the first year of the vaccine rollout alone, or one preventable death every 24 seconds,” the statement reads.
“We have been here before. At the height of the HIVAIDS pandemic, millions died as expensive, patented treatments were unaffordable for much of the world.”
US Investigations
Tedros had previously urged any countries with information on the COVID-19 origins to come forward after several U.S. officials said it was most likely that the virus had been leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.Wray noted that the bureau’s investigation is still classified and that he can’t share many details. He also said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hasn’t been cooperative with U.S. efforts.
“I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here,” Wray said. “The work that our U.S. government and close foreign partners are doing. And that’s unfortunate for everybody.”
The very first COVID-19 infections were recorded in late 2019 in Wuhan. The CCP didn’t admit human-to-human transmission of the virus until January 2020, when officials claimed that the virus was first transmitted in a wet market in the city—a theory for which no evidence has been found to support the claim.
WHO Calls for Transparency from China
Tedros said in February that the WHO wasn’t looking to blame any government or organization but rather to “advance our understanding of how this pandemic started so we can prevent, prepare for, and respond to future epidemics and pandemics.”Earlier on in the pandemic, the WHO came under criticism after Tedros and other officials praised the CCP for its “transparency” in dealing with COVID-19.
“What they are doing is a very, very strong measure and with full commitment,” Tedros said of the regime in early 2020, weeks after the virus emerged.
