AFP WHO research team members at the animal market in Wuhan in January 2021
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 13:26
The World Health Organization (WHO) has scrapped plans to conduct more research into the origins of the coronavirus, reports the scientific journal Nature. The researchers will not be allowed access to China.
Global political interests currently make follow-up studies impossible, WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove told Nature. “There is no second phase of research anymore.”
Market with live animals
At the beginning of 2021, a team of scientists under the flag of the WHO was able to conduct research in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the corona virus was first found more than a year earlier. The main question was where the virus came from. The researchers came up with the same place time and time again: a market where live animals were traded.
Nevertheless, they immediately added that they would like to conduct follow-up research in China. Because how the virus ended up on that market, for example, is still an unanswered question.
But the Chinese refused, because it had been made sufficiently clear where the virus came from. In addition, they resented that the WHO also wanted to investigate the theory that the virus had “escaped” from a laboratory in Wuhan. The US government subsequently accused China of a lack of openness.
Researcher Marion Koopmans, who was also part of the WHO mission to Wuhan, denounces the politicization of these studies:
