A controversial theory that Covid-19 came from a laboratory in Wuhan is “extremely unlikely”, experts from the World Health Organisation (WHO) have said.
Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the WHO mission, spoke at a press conference this morning to unveil the results of phase one of the organisation’s investigation into how the pandemic started.
“The laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population,” he said. “Therefore [it] is not in the hypotheses that we will suggest for future studies.”
Liang Wannian, the lead Chinese envoy who is working on the investigation, said after a review of mortality data, antibody tests of blood in blood banks in Wuhan, and genome sequences, there was “no indication of the transmission of the Sars-Cov-2 in the population” before December 2019.
A team of WHO-appointed experts has been in China for the past few weeks investigating the origins of Sars-Cov-2 – the virus that causes Covid-19 – and has visited a range of locations in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus first emerged in late 2019 and early 2020.
It is currently thought that the virus originally circulated in bats or pangolins.
Details soon