��ɫtv

That was also the drawn by the first WHO expert group that investigated the pandemic’s origins in 2021, when scientists concluded the virus likely spread from bats to humans, via another intermediary animal. At the time, WHO said a lab leak was “extremely unlikely.”

Venter said that after more than three years of work, WHO’s expert group was unable to get the necessary data to evaluate whether or not COVID-19 was the result of a , despite repeated requests for hundreds of genetic sequences and more detailed biosecurity information that were made to the Chinese government.

“Therefore, this hypothesis could not be investigated or excluded,” she said. “It was deemed to be very speculative, based on political opinions and not backed up by science.” She said that the 27-member group did not reach a consensus; one member resigned earlier this week and three others asked for their names to be removed from the report.

Venter said there was no evidence to prove that COVID-19 had been manipulated in a lab, nor was there any indication that the virus had been spreading before December 2019 anywhere outside of China.

“Until more scientific data becomes available, the origins of how SARS-CoV-2 entered human populations will remain inconclusive,” Venter said, referring to the scientific name for the COVID-19 virus.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was a “moral imperative” to determine how COVID began, noting that the virus killed at least , wiped at least $10 trillion from the global economy and upended the lives of billions.

Last year, the that the Chinese government froze meaningful domestic and international efforts to trace the virus' origins in the first weeks of the outbreak in 2020 and that WHO itself may have missed early opportunities to investigate how COVID-19 began.

U.S. President Donald Trump has long blamed the emergence of the coronavirus on a laboratory accident in China, while a found there was insufficient evidence to prove the theory.

have repeatedly dismissed the idea that the pandemic could have started in a lab, saying that the search for its origins should be conducted in other countries.

Last September, researchers zeroed in on a they think might have spread COVID-19 to humans, including racoon dogs, civet cats and bamboo rats.

__

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.