Two US scientists warned the world of the consequences of not tracing the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, saying that more such outbreaks could be in store. As Bloomberg reported, Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, said: “There is going to be COVID-26 and COVID-32 unless we fully understand the origins of COVID-19,” Hotez said. The publication also quoted Scott Gottlieb, a commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration in the Trump administration who now sits on the board of Pfizer Inc, as saying that China hasn’t provided evidence to disprove the theory of lab leak (from Wuhan Institute of Virology), while the search for signs that the virus emerged from wildlife hasn’t yielded results.
Pressure is mounting on the WHO to discover the origins of the pandemic. The COVID-19 virus either emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals or it was a laboratory accident, the US intelligence community said on Thursday.
"The US intelligence community does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus was transmitted initially but has coalesced around two likely scenarios: either it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, or it was a laboratory accident," Assistant Director of National Intelligence for Strategic Communications Amanda Schoch said.
"While two elements of the intelligence community lean toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter, each with low or moderate confidence, the majority of elements within the intelligence community do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other," she said.
"The IC continues to examine all available evidence, consider different perspectives, and aggressively collect and analyse new information to identify the virus's origins," Schoch said, a day after US President Joe Biden ordered the intelligence agencies to "redouble" their efforts in investigating the emergence of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic and report back to him in 90 days.
-Inputs from PTI