WHO Director Discusses with Chinese PM Origin of Coronavirus

The Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced on Saturday that he met with Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang and discussed with him the investigation, which is still faltering, into the origin of the Coronavirus.

"I am pleased to have met Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang. We discussed COVID-19 and the need to make a great effort in terms of equitable distribution of vaccines this year in order to vaccinate 70% of the population of the world," during a visit to Beijing on the occasion of the Olympic Games, Ghebreyesus wrote in a tweet. Winter 2022.

He continued, "We also discussed the need to cooperate more closely" to determine "the origins of the virus based on science and evidence."

It is the first visit of the Director-General of the UN organization to China since January 2020, a few weeks after the announcement of the first infections with the Coronavirus in the city of Wuhan.

International experts from the WHO visited Wuhan in January 2021 to investigate the origins of the virus in cooperation with their Chinese counterparts.

In a joint investigation issued in March 2021, they considered that the most likely scenario is that the virus was transmitted from bats to humans through an intermediary animal, while they considered that the theory of the virus leaking from a laboratory is highly unlikely.

However, the Director-General of the Health Organization then called for a more in-depth investigation into the hypothesis of the virus leaking from a laboratory in China, stressing that international experts had faced "difficulties in accessing preliminary data" in China, in a rare criticism of how Beijing handled the investigation.