WHO Urges Countries To Reveal Intel On COVID Origins After FBI Director’s Statements

Following the dramatic narrative shift on Covid origins by US authorities, the World Health Organization is asking any governments with intelligence on the virus’ origins to come forward and present their information. 

“If any country has information about the origins of the pandemic, it’s essential for that information to be shared with WHO and the international scientific community,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday, coming quickly on the heels of FBI Director Christopher Wray saying this week that the source of the pandemic was “most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan”.

Via Reuters

The WHO chief said further, “Not so as to apportion blame but to advance our understanding of how this pandemic started, so we can prevent, prepare for and respond to future epidemics and pandemics.”

“WHO continues to call for [China] to be transparent in sharing data and to conduct the necessary investigations and share the results. To that effect, I have written to, and spoken with, high-level Chinese leaders on multiple occasions, as recently as just a few weeks ago.”

Tedros also stressed, and not for the first time, that “Until then, all hypotheses on the origins of the virus remain on the table.”

Though of course, it’s highly doubtful that Beijing will be feeling any real pressure as a result of this very much belated statement. It’s important to recall how he spent the early months of the pandemic publicly kowtowing to China.

The WHO came under heavy fire early into the pandemic for praising China’s “transparent” response to the pandemic, repeating misinformation from Beijing related to human-to-human transmission, and bowing to pressure from Chinese President Xi Jinping not to declare the Covid-19 outbreak an emergency.

The FBI has assessed that a leak from a laboratory in the central Chinese city of Wuhan likely caused the COVID pandemic, director Christopher Wray said, a claim China said had ‘no credibility whatsoever’ https://t.co/1IGah4j2SH pic.twitter.com/5zg0qVzHzL

— Reuters (@Reuters) March 1, 2023

Yet, while initially promoting the natural origin theory, Tedros and the WHO have reportedly become far more ‘open’ to the lab leak theory as time has passed.