US leads concern over WHO-backed Covid origins report
WASHINGTON, United States — The United States led a chorus of concern on Tuesday over a WHO-backed report into the origins of the coronavirus in China, with accusations swirling that Beijing failed to give proper access to investigators.
The United States released a statement with 13 of its allies — Britain, Japan and Australia among them — saying the inquiry had lacked the data and samples it needed.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had earlier made a similar criticism, saying the team he dispatched to Wuhan had found it difficult to get raw data.
Neither Tedros nor the US-led statement mentioned China directly, but the country's foreign ministry hit back at the perceived criticism from the WHO chief, saying that Beijing had demonstrated "its openness, transparency and responsible attitude."
"To politicize this issue will only severely hinder global cooperation in study of origins, jeopardize anti-pandemic cooperation, and cost more lives," the ministry said in a statement.
The European Union called the report a "helpful first step" but highlighted "the need for further work," urging "relevant authorities" to help.
Mike Pompeo, the former top US diplomat under Donald Trump, blasted it as a "sham" and part of a "disinformation campaign," accusing the WHO of being in cahoots with the Chinese Communist Party.
Trump had promoted a theory that the virus could have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, which the WHO-backed experts dismissed in their report. But Tedros stressed that "all hypotheses are open, from what I read from the report... and warrant complete and further studies."
'Needed a break'
The pandemic has killed nearly 2.8 million people worldwide since it first emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, with several countries now battling new waves of infection.
Italy said on Tuesday it would impose a five-day quarantine on travelers arriving from other EU countries, while Germany will beef up checks along land borders to ensure people arriving have negative Covid-19 tests.
Large numbers of lockdown-weary Germans have nevertheless booked holidays to Spanish tourist island Mallorca.
"I really needed a break, it's hard to work at home without seeing anyone," said 53-year-old Birgit Leeck on one of the island's golden beaches.
Germany said Tuesday it would only deploy AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccine for general use for those aged over 60.
The World Health Organization and the EU's health watchdog have both deemed the AstraZeneca vaccine safe, but several countries have restricted its use over blood clotting fears.
In France, hospitals were under pressure after partial regional shutdowns failed to keep the number of people in intensive care below the country's second-wave peak.
'Time to act'
World leaders on Tuesday called for a new international treaty to better fight future outbreaks and for countries to be ready if — or when — another hits.
"Together, we must be better prepared to predict, prevent, detect, assess and effectively respond to pandemics in a highly coordinated fashion," they urged.
More than 20 countries — including Germany, France, South Korea and South Africa — signed up to the plea.
Tedros urged the world to not waste any time in preparing for the next contagion, saying: "The time to act is now. The world cannot afford to wait until the pandemic is over to start planning for the next one."
The expert report on the origins of Covid-19 concluded that the virus probably came from bats and jumped to humans from another animal.
The experts judged it "extremely unlikely" that the virus was grown in a lab, and were also unimpressed by Beijing's theory that the virus did not originate in China at all but was imported in frozen food.
The pandemic has also rolled back years of progress towards gender equality, according to a World Economic Forum study.
Research showed that Covid-19 has had a disproportionate impact on women, who have lost jobs at a higher rate than men, and had to take on much more of the childcare burden when schools closed.
"Another generation of women will have to wait for gender parity," the WEF said in a statement. — with Nina Larson and Robin Millard in Geneva and AFP bureaus
Follow this page for updates on a mysterious pneumonia outbreak that has struck dozens of people in China.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says on Sunday that he had contracted COVID-19, testing positive at a key point in his flailing campaign for re-election.
Hipkins saYS on his official social media feed that he would need to isolate for up to five days -- less than two weeks before his country's general election.
The leader of the centre-left Labour Party said he started to experience cold symptoms on Saturday and had cancelled most of his weekend engagements. — AFP
The World Health Organization and US health authorities say Friday they are closely monitoring a new variant of COVID-19, although the potential impact of BA.2.86 is currently unknown.
The WHO classified the new variant as one under surveillance "due to the large number (more than 30) of spike gene mutations it carries", it wrote in a bulletin about the pandemic late Thursday.
So far, the variant has only been detected in Israel, Denmark and the United States. — AFP
The World Health Organization says on Friday that the number of new COVID-19 cases reported worldwide rose by 80% in the last month, days after designating a new "variant of interest".
The WHO declared in May that Covid is no longer a global health emergency, but has warned that the virus will continue to circulate and mutate, causing occasional spikes in infections, hospitalisations and deaths.
In its weekly update, the UN agency said that nations reported nearly 1.5 million new cases from July 10 to August 6, an 80% increase compared to the previous 28 days. — AFP
The head of US intelligence says that there was no evidence that the COVID-19 virus was created in the Chinese government's Wuhan research lab.
In a declassified report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says they had no information backing recent claims that three scientists at the lab were some of the very first infected with COVID-19 and may have created the virus themselves.
Drawing on intelligence collected by various member agencies of the US intelligence community (IC), the ODNI report says some scientists at the Wuhan lab had done genetic engineering of coronaviruses similar to COVID-19. — AFP
Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over Covid lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street when he was prime minister, a UK parliament committee ruled on Thursday.
The cross-party Privileges Committee said Johnson, 58, would have been suspended as an MP for 90 days for "repeated contempts (of parliament) and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process".
But he avoided any formal sanction by his peers in the House of Commons by resigning as an MP last week.
In his resignation statement last Friday, Johnson pre-empted publication of the committee's conclusions, claiming a political stitch-up, even though the body has a majority from his own party.
He was unrepentant again on Thursday, accusing the committee of being "anti-democratic... to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination".
Calling it "beneath contempt", he said it was "for the people of this to decide who sits in parliament, not Harriet Harman", the veteran opposition Labour MP who chaired the seven-person committee. — AFP
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