The unsolved mystery of the origin of the coronavirus – No progress a year later

Despite a group of experts visiting China in January, the planet is not close to an answer as to the origin of COVID-19, says one of the authors of an open letter calling for new research on the coronavirus pandemic.

“At this point we have not gone further than where we were a year ago”, said Nikolai Petrovsky, a vaccine specialist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. He is one of 26 experts from around the world who signed the open letter, which was published on Thursday, according to Reuters.

Last January, a team of scientists selected by World Organization Health (WHO) visited hospitals and research centers in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus was first identified, in search of evidence of the origin of COVID-19.

This mission has come under fire, with critics accusing the WHO of relying too much on politically compromised Chinese facts and figures. The members of the research team also said that China was reluctant to share vital data that may indicate that COVID-19 was circulating months before it was first recognized.

The open letter states that the World Health Organization mission “did not have the mandate, independence or access to conduct a full and unrestricted investigation” into all theories about the origin of COVID-19.

“All the possibilities remain on the table and I have not yet seen a single piece of independent scientific data that excludes any of them.”, said Petrovsky.

At a news conference to mark the end of the WHO’s visit to Uhan, the head of the mission, Peter Ben Ebarek, appeared to rule out the possibility of the virus leaking from a laboratory in Wuhan.

However, Petrovsky said it “made no sense” to rule out any possibility, and that the purpose of the open letter was “to recognize globally that no one has yet identified the source of the virus and we must continue to search.”