WHO scraps plan for interim report on Wuhan mission

WASHINGTON • The World Health Organisation (WHO) has scrapped plans for an interim report from a team that visited China's Wuhan to probe the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, The Wall Street Journal reported late on Thursday.

Wuhan is the city where the coronavirus was first detected in late 2019.

The WHO team returned recently from its visit there saying it had no clear finding on the genesis of the virus, amid tensions between the US and China on what caused the global health crisis.

The United States responded by saying it had "deep concerns" about what the team found out, and it pressed China for more information.

WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had said on Feb 12 that a preliminary report with a summary of the team's findings would be issued soon thereafter, and a full report in a matter of weeks.

But now the plan is to scrap the interim report, the Journal said, quoting Dr Peter Ben Embarek, the scientist who led the team.

Instead, the team will publish the full and final report, with a summary of its findings, the newspaper said, quoting a WHO spokesman.

This broader report "will be published in coming weeks and will include key findings", it quoted this spokesman as saying.

"By definition, a summary report does not have all the details," Dr Ben Embarek was quoted as saying. "So since there (is) so much interest in this report, a summary only would not satisfy the curiosity of the readers."

On Thursday, US State Department spokesman Ned Price called on China to share what it knows from the earliest days of the pandemic.

"It is about learning and doing, being positioned to do everything we can to protect ourselves, the American people, and the international community against pandemic threats going forward," Mr Price told a briefing.

"That's why we need this understanding. That's why we need this transparency from the Chinese government," he said.

Meanwhile, a small group of scientists and others who believe the coronavirus could have originated from a laboratory leak or accident is calling for an inquiry independent of the WHO team.

While many scientists involved in researching the origins of the virus continue to assert that the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic almost certainly began in a leap from bats to an intermediate animal to humans, other theories persist and have gained new visibility with the WHO visit to China.

Officials with the WHO have said in recent interviews that it was "extremely unlikely" but not impossible that the spread of the virus was linked to some laboratory accident.

The scientists' open letter lists what the signers see as flaws in the joint WHO-China inquiry and states that the inquiry could not adequately address the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab.

The letter further posits the type of investigation that would be adequate, including full access to records within China.

The WHO mission has been political from the start, as the international team's members acknowledged.

Dr Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in the US and one of the scientists who signed the letter, said that no one in the group thought that the virus had been intentionally created as a weapon, but they were all convinced that an origin in a lab through research or by accidental infection was as likely as a spillover occurring in nature from animals to humans.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, NYTIMES