The World Health Organization is reviving its stalled investigation into the origins of COVID-19 with a new team of about 20 scientists. The team—including specialists in laboratory safety and biosecurity and geneticists and animal-disease experts versed in how viruses spill over from nature—is being assembled with a mandate to find new evidence in China and elsewhere. The possibilities that the new team is charged with examining include whether the COVID-19 virus could have emerged from a lab, according to WHO officials.
The new Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens will be a permanent panel that will help the WHO investigate future outbreaks and identify human activities that raise the risk of the emergence of new diseases. As part of that mission, it will take charge of a probe into the origin of the current pandemic. The initiative, as described by WHO officials and Western diplomats and in WHO notices, represents a fresh attempt to advance an investigation that the agency’s own staff has said risks running out of time before evidence such as blood samples are thrown away. ...
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