GENEVA (Reuters) – The World Health Organization (WHO) has not abandoned any plans to trace the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, its director-general said on Friday.
“I have written and spoken to high-level Chinese leaders several times, even just a few weeks ago. Until then, all hypotheses about the origin of the virus remain on the table,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. .
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that the US energy department had concluded that the pandemic was likely the result of a leak in a Chinese lab, an assessment Beijing denies.
“I want to be very clear that the WHO has not abandoned any plans to trace the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Tedros said.
(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber in Geneva and Bhanvi Satija in Bengaluru; editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
