The Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has called for Chinese cooperation with its efforts to establish the origins of COVID-19, after unveiling a new guide on the investigation of novel pathogens.
At a press conference on Thursday (September 4), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called on senior Chinese leaders to cooperate with an independent assessment of how the COVID-19 pandemic began, including “sharing information on the Hunan seafood market, the earliest known and suspected cases of COVID-19, and the work done at laboratories in Wuhan, China.”
Tedros added that without this information, “none of us are able to rule any hypothesis out.”
The Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), established by WHO (World Health Organisation) in 2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, is conducting the investigation.
At the press conference, Tedros announce the publication of SAGO’s guide for the investigation of emergent or re-emergent pathogens.
“This framework should be used by member states each time a new pathogen emerges. It would have been useful to implement when COVID-19 struck,” said Tedros.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus speak at WHO monthly press conference, 4 September
The framework elaborates six elements that need to be addressed, emphasising the creation of a surveillance system that will respond to certain triggers, such as links between infections and the environment, clusters of acute infections, and infections associated with similar symptoms.
It also recommends that multidisciplinary investigation teams be assembled in the country where the pathogen/infection is first detected, and outlines what a typical report should include to provide useful information to national authorities about the novel pathogen.
The origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus are not yet fully understood, with Tedros describing ongoing efforts as “a scientific imperative, to prevent future outbreaks, and a moral imperative for the sake of those who lose their lives to them.”
Lab leak theories propounded by some have been largely debunked. The Lancet Microbe, a prominent clinical microbiology journal, published an editorial in August describing such theories as “simply wrong.”
While the editorial recognises that it can be “scholarly” to examine alternative hypotheses, especially when evidence is scarce, “these alternative hypotheses have been implausible for a long time and have only become more-so with increasing scrutiny.”