A World Health Organization task force charged with investigating how the COVID-19 pandemic began released its final report on Friday, reaching a disappointing conclusion: Scientists are still not sure how the worst emergency in a century began.
At a news briefing, Marietjie Venter, the group’s chair, said most scientific data supports the hypothesis that the novel coronavirus jumped to humans from animals.
That was also the conclusion of the first WHO expert panel investigating the origins of the pandemic in 2021, when scientists concluded the virus likely spread from bats to humans via another intermediary animal. At the time, they said a lab leak was “extremely unlikely.”
Venter said that after more than three years of work, the expert panel was unable to obtain the necessary data to assess whether or not COVID-19 was the result of a laboratory accident, despite repeated requests for hundreds of genetic sequences and more detailed biosafety information from the Chinese government.
“Therefore, this hypothesis could not be investigated or ruled out,” she said. “It was considered highly speculative, based on political views, and not supported by science.”
She said the 27-member group is not reaching consensus; one member resigned this week and three others asked to have their names removed from the report.
Venter said there was no evidence to prove that CoVid-19 was manipulated in a lab, nor was there any indication that the virus had spread anywhere outside of China before December 2019.
“Until more scientific data becomes available, the origin of how SARS-COV-2 entered human populations will remain inconclusive,” Venter said, referring to the scientific name for the COVID-19 virus.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was a “moral imperative” to determine how Covid began, noting that the virus killed at least 20 million people, wiped out at least $10 trillion from the global economy and upended the lives of billions.
Last year, The Associated Press revealed that the Chinese government froze meaningful domestic and international efforts to trace the origins of the virus in the early weeks of the 2020 outbreak and that it may have missed early opportunities to study how CoVid-19 began.
US President Donald Trump has long blamed the emergence of the coronavirus on a laboratory accident in China, while US intelligence analysis has found there is insufficient evidence to prove the theory.
Chinese officials have repeatedly rejected the idea that the pandemic could have started in a laboratory, saying the search for its origins should be conducted in other countries.
Last September, researchers zeroed in on a short list of animals they thought might have spread CoVid-19 to humans, including raccoon dogs, civet cats, and bamboo rats.
