The World Health Organization is reviving its stalled investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 virus as agency officials warn that time is running out to determine how the pandemic that has killed more than 4.7 million people world-wide began.
A new team of about 20 scientists—including specialists in laboratory safety and biosecurity and geneticists and animal-disease experts versed in how viruses spill over from nature—is being assembled with a mandate to hunt for new evidence in China and elsewhere.
Washington and its allies have been urging the WHO, the United Nations’ public-health arm, to push ahead with a probe. China has resisted, arguing that any new inquiry should focus on other countries, including the U.S.
The possibilities that the new team is charged with examining include whether the Covid-19 virus could have emerged from a lab, according to WHO officials, a hypothesis that has especially angered China.
The new effort comes months after another WHO-led inquiry visited Wuhan, the Chinese city that was the site of the first confirmed Covid-19 outbreak in December 2019. In a final report, the team said the data provided by Chinese scientists during the mission was insufficient to answer the critical questions of when, where and how the virus began spreading.