Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, said access to raw data was a challenge at the start of the investigation into the origins of Covid-19 and called on countries to be cooperative with future phases.
“We have done the phase one, and the phase one has shown some progress, but there are also some challenges that have to be addressed,” he said during a news briefing in Geneva Thursday. “One of the challenges is what you mentioned, you know, access to raw data, especially the data at the start of the pandemic, the raw data was not shared.”
In the second phase, “we are asking, actually, China to be transparent, open and cooperate, especially on the information, raw data we asked for at the early days of the pandemic,” he said, noting WHO would be discussing phase two of the investigation with member states.
Tedros later said that he didn’t think momentum had been lost on the origins investigation.
“We need to continue the study in order to know what exactly happened,” he said. “If we know what happened, then we can prevent future similar crises or problems.”
The investigation is one of the basics for outbreaks, regardless of their size, he said, and what is done when any outbreak happens, so that the origins can be understood.
“There is the other part of it, especially considering the unprecedented nature of this pandemic, the number of people that died and the number of people that suffered,” Tedros said. “Take the number of deaths alone, more than four million, I think we owe it to them to know what happened. And everybody should cooperate to know what happened, and to prevent the same crisis from happening again. And that’s why we need cooperation.”
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