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Saturday, 13 February 2021_The World Health Organization (WHO) says all hypotheses are still open in its search for the origins of the new coronavirus, although a team of its investigators quashed the allegations that the virus escaped from a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
A WHO-led team that spent four weeks in China concluded its investigative mission in Wuhan this week, saying that the “laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely.”
It “is not in the hypotheses that we will suggest for future studies,” said Peter Ben Embarek, who heads the team.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, however, said on Friday, “I wish to confirm that all hypotheses remain open and require further analysis and studies.”
He said that the team had conducted a “very important scientific exercise in very difficult circumstances.”
“We have always said that this mission would not find all the answers, but it has added important information that takes us closer to understanding the origins of the virus,” Tedros said.
"Some of that work may lie outside the remit and scope of this mission," he added.
The team said that its main hypotheses are that the virus originated in a bat, although there are several possible scenarios for how it passed to humans.
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