WHO's COVID origins investigation in China has become 'very difficult'

Top World Health Organization officials say they'll keep trying to learn how COVID-19 began but have run up against a lack of full cooperation from China.

"WHO has not abandoned studying the origins of COVID-19. We have not. And we will not," said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO's technical lead for COVID-19.

"But we need cooperation from our colleagues in China to advance this," she said Wednesday. "I do also want to mention that through the work of studying the origins, it is very difficult."

Van Kerkhove said the U.N. health agency updated its plans based on China's response but there's been "no quiet shelving of any plans" for the investigation.

"We continue to ask for more cooperation and collaboration with our colleagues in China to advance studies that need to take place in China," she said. "We have not stopped any work. We will not stop until we understand the origins of this. And it is becoming increasingly difficult because the more time that passes, the more difficult it becomes to really understand what happened in those early stages of the pandemic."

China's foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said China’s position on the investigation is consistent.

"We always support and participate in science-based global origins-tracing. At the same time, we firmly oppose all forms of political manipulation," he told a regular press conference Wednesday in Beijing.

"Since COVID-19 broke out," he said, "the Chinese side has twice received WHO experts for origins-tracing cooperation, which produced a scientific and authoritative joint report and laid a solid foundation for global origins-tracing."

Many questions remain, however, and finding out how the pandemic started is of "crucial" importance, according to WHO's Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

"And we should continue pursuing," he said. "Two reasons why we need to know the origins of this pandemic. First, it is science. And secondly it is a moral issue."

From a scientific point of view, it's important to know how the pandemic started to prevent the next one, Tedros said. And from a moral standpoint, he added, it's important to know how millions of people lost their lives.

So it has a science and a moral issue and we need to continue to push until we get the answer," he said. "I sent a letter to a top official in China asking for cooperation, because we need cooperation and transparency and the information we asked in order to know how this started."

Keeping an 'open mind'

Nothing's been ruled out, including the unproven so-called lab leak theory that the virus might have come from a scientific lab. Even the former top U.S. official who led the government's response to the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said in November he remains open to any theory about how it began and spread.

"I have a totally open mind about that. But if you look at the preponderance of evidence that has been accumulated by international group of highly respected evolutionary virologists, they feel – and they've written peer-reviewed papers on that – that the evidence strongly points to this being a natural occurrence of a jumping of a virus from a bat to an animal species to human," he told NBC's Meet the Press.

"Hasn't been definitively proven, but the evidence on that is pretty strong," Fauci added. "Having said that, we still all have to keep an open mind as to what the origin is."

After two years of mostly discounting the lab leak theory, WHO issued an eagerly awaited report last June recommending "further investigations into this and all other possible pathways."

The U.N. health agency's scientific advisory panel delivered a 44-page preliminary report that marked a distinct shift from an assessment a year earlier that the lab leak hypothesis — initially labeled a conspiracy theory — was "extremely unlikely."

But the panel – as echoed in Fauci's comments – said it found the strongest evidence pointed to an outbreak caused by zoonotic transmission: an infectious disease transmitted between species from animals to humans, or vice versa.

Without directly referring to China, Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies chief, noted that "it's the primary responsibility of governments and nation states to investigate diseases within their borders."

"Primarily for the purpose of protecting their own populations by understanding where a disease comes from," he said. "We will see that with multiple diseases. It is notoriously difficult to ascertain that unless there is a concerted effort."