WHO Chief Tedros Says Hopes China Will Increase Cooperation Over Origins of COVID-19

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Thursday urged China to increase cooperation on the probe into the origins of COVID-19.

"I think we owe it to the millions who suffered and to the millions who died, really to understand what happened. And I hope there will be better cooperation and we have continued the engagement with China and also with member states and there will be better cooperation to getting to the bottom of what happened", Tedros told a press briefing.

US President Joe Biden has ordered the US intelligence community to produce a report re-examining the origins of the coronavirus and determining whether the disease leaked from a lab or spread from an infected animal to a human. China, in turn, continues to call the laboratory-leak theory a conspiracy.

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with investigating the origins of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Wuhan, Hubei province, China February 3, 2021.

© REUTERS / THOMAS PETER

In January, international experts travelled to Wuhan where they examined a laboratory, hospitals and markets for clues on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The WHO expert mission then compiled a report, saying that a leak of the new coronavirus from a laboratory in Wuhan, the first hotbed of COVID-19, was very unlikely.

The report, released in March, said that the new virus was most likely transmitted to humans from bats through an intermediary host.