World’s top leaders, part of the G7 grouping, are all set to call for a new and transparent probe into the origins of the novel coronavirus, whose outbreak started in China’s Wuhan city in December 2019 and triggered a global pandemic.
The Guardian has published a report citing a leaked draft communique, which was seen by Bloomberg, that the leaders at the G7 Summit in Cornwall, the United Kingdom, will urge the World Health Organisation to initiate a fresh investigation.
An earlier on-the-ground probe by the WHO had said that the suspicion that a laboratory was to be blamed for the pandemic was “extremely unlikely”.
The call is likely to come amid growing demands from the scientific community that unless we know the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, we will not be able to prevent future pandemics of a similar or worse scale.
Come clean: US to China
The US administration of Joe Biden has already made the call a few days back amid a fresh domestic move to expand the American investigation into the origins of the coronavirus. US intelligence officials suspect the virus could have been leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was not likely passed onto humans from an animal host in a natural event at a Wuhan seafood market.
This comes on the back of top US infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci calling on China to come forth with more information about six labourers who had fallen ill while working in a mine in the country’s Yunnan province in 2012.
It is believed that more information on the illness, the labourers had contracted, could shed light on the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
The workers, who were tasked with cleaning bat faeces from a copper mine in April 2012, were hospitalised weeks later with persistent coughs, fevers, head and chest pains and breathing difficulties. Three of them had later died.
The Mojiang mine is located in southwest China, some 1,500 kilometres from Wuhan.
