MESOPOTAMIA NEWS Top of the Agenda – U.S., Others Renew Calls for COVID-19 Origin Probe

May 26, 2021
At the World Health Organization’s (WHO) main annual meeting, U.S. representatives called for (AFP) a new robust, expert-led inquiry into the origins of COVID-19, while a Chinese delegate said Beijing considered (WSJ) a WHO-led probe in China earlier this year to be complete and that further investigations should focus elsewhere.

The WHO report released in March said it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus originated in a lab. But researchers had limited access to data in China, and WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus later said further investigation (FT) was needed. Australia, Japan, and Portugal were among other countries that called for additional research. On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. intelligence services found that three staff members at a lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus was first reported, were hospitalized with COVID-19-like symptoms in November 2019. The WHO probe found (CNN) that no lab workers had tested positive for the virus.

 
Analysis
“Given the relationship between China and the U.S., there’s a negligible chance that the Chinese [government] would capitulate to U.S. requests for a full and independent investigation,” Georgetown University’s Lawrence O. Gostin tells the Wall Street Journal.

“For all the questions the [WHO] joint report raises, it also sheds important light—some of it on the flaws in the health governance regime itself,” CFR’s Yanzhong Huang writes for Foreign Affairs.