Geopolitical tensions hinder efforts to reach the bottom of COVID-19’s origins.
Why does it matter: Understanding how COVID-19 started can help us prevent future pandemics – especially if it involved any leak or accident at a virology lab.
News management: The findings of a WHO-led mission in Wuhan, China, earlier this year to investigate the origins of COVID-19 are expected by mid-March, health agency officials told a news conference on Friday after a planned interim report. apparently married.
Context: The WHO team received international criticism when its members concluded at a news conference at the end of its trip that a laboratory accident was “extremely unlikely”, while remaining open to the possibility – promoted by Beijing – that the virus would originate. elsewhere and have been introduced to China through contaminated frozen foods.
Be smart: The most likely explanation remains the simplest: the coronavirus jumped from a host of Chinese animals to humans, the kind of zoonotic spillover observed in countless other emerging outbreaks.
- But a pandemic threat due to laboratory leaks is real, and as our ability to handle viruses increases, so does the danger.
- Although we are limited in our ability to prevent zoonotic discharges, we can and should be able to do much more to monitor and regulate the type of research that could lead to the accidental introduction of a new virus.
Bottom line: Without much better transparency, it is unlikely that we will ever know for sure how COVID-19 started – and what steps we need to take to prevent it from happening again.