GENEVA – The chief of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has urged China to offer more information on the origins of Covid-19 and is ready to send a second team to probe the matter, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

“We’re pressing China to give full access, and we are asking countries to raise it during their bilateral meetings – to urge Beijing to cooperate,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the newspaper.

The WHO chief’s comments come as the health authorities and pharmaceutical companies across the world have been racing to update vaccines to combat newer emerging coronavirus variants.

The first cases were detected at the end of 2019 in Wuhan, China, suggesting two opposing theories: an escape from a laboratory in the city where such viruses were being studied, or an intermediate animal that infected people at a local market.

A team of specialists led by the WHO and accompanied by Chinese colleagues had investigated China in early 2021.

In a joint report, they favoured the hypothesis that the virus had been transmitted by intermediary animal from a bat to a human, possibly at a market.

Dr Tedros said after that that all options remained “on the table”.

There has not been a team able to return to China, and WHO officials have repeatedly asked for additional data.

Dr Tedros has repeatedly said the WHO would not abandon its investigation and has called on Beijing for transparency in sharing data, carrying out investigations and sharing the results.

The WHO lifted the highest alert level that had been in place for the pandemic earlier in 2023.

Thanks to vaccines, post-infection immunity and better treatment, the virus is now under greater control, although with the arrival of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, new variants are emerging. REUTERS, AFP