White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement that it is imperative that the report be independent and free from “alteration by the Chinese government”, echoing concerns raised by the administration of former President Donald Trump, who also moved to quit the WHO over the issue.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy fired back with a strongly-worded statement, saying the United States had damaged multilateral cooperation and the WHO in recent years, and should not be “pointing fingers” at China and other countries that supported the WHO during the Covid-19 pandemic.

China welcomed the U.S. decision to reengage with the WHO, but Washington should hold itself to the “highest standards” instead of taking aim at other countries, the spokesperson said.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Friday said all hypotheses were still open about the origins of Covid-19, after Washington said it wanted to review data from a WHO-led mission to China, where the virus first emerged.

A WHO-led mission, which spent four weeks in China probing the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak, said this week that it was not looking further into the question of whether the virus escaped from a lab, which is considered highly unlikely.

The Trump administration had said it suspected the virus may have escaped from a Chinese lab, which Beijing strongly denies.

Sullivan noted that U.S. President Joe Biden had quickly reversed the decision to disengage from the WHO, but said it was imperative to protect the organization’s credibility.

China refused to give raw data on early Covid-19 cases to the WHO-led team probing the origins of the pandemic, according to one of the team’s investigators, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the outbreak began.

The team had requested raw patient data on 174 cases that China had identified from the early phase of the outbreak in the city of Wuhan in December 2019, as well as other cases, but were only provided with a summary, Retuers reported.

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In the factsheet, US claims to have evidence that several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick in autumn of 2019, before the first identified case of the coronavirus outbreak, with symptoms consistent with the both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness. US maintain its claims that the virus may have escaped the controversial Wuhan lab.

According to the factsheet , the department says that the virus could have emerged from human contact with infected animals or through a laboratory accident. The report says, “Scientists in China have researched animal-derived coronaviruses under conditions that increased the risk for accidental and potentially unwitting exposure”.

US released the fact sheets as 13 international experts of the World Health Organisation (WHO) arrived in China to probe the origin of the coronavirus.

Major claims

The fact sheet highlights three major elements about the COVID-19 virus- illness inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology(WIV), Research at the WIV and Secret military activity at WIV.

The factsheet claim that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in 2019 before the first outbreak was reported. This raises the questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection”among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses, the report says. It also mentioned about how accidental infections in Chinese labs have contributed to previous virus outbreak.

The US also claimed the involvement of Chinese military in secret military experiments in Wuhan lab since 2017.The report says, “The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017″. It added, “The United States and other donors who funded or collaborated on civilian research at the WIV have a right and obligation to determine whether any of our research funding was diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the WIV”.

The US asserted that the WHO investigators must have access to the records of the WIV’s work on bat and other coronaviruses before the coronavirus outbreak.

“As part of a thorough inquiry, they must have a full accounting of why the WIV altered and then removed online records of its work with RaTG13 and other viruses,” the US fact sheet said.

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You may ridicule her but you can’t ignore her bold initiatives in leading from the front against diseases. Kerala’s Virus Warrior, as one magazine had called State’s Health Minister K.K. Shailaja, has been featured in Science magazine published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Under the heading ‘How a communist physics teacher flattened the COVID-19 curve in southern India’ the magazine traces her work in controlling the spread of COVID-19 in Kerala. Even though she had been called names in the State Assembly by the Opposition, it was her alertness that had stemmed the spread the virus in the State quite early.
The report starts, ‘When the World Health Organization (WHO) issued its first statement on the spread of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China, on 18 January, few local governments in India paid close attention. But K. K. Shailaja, the diminutive woman running the health ministry in the southern state of Kerala, immediately perked up her ears.

Shailaja knew many students from Kerala were studying at Wuhan University, and she understood the havoc an outbreak could cause. In 2018, during her first stint as a minister, she faced an outbreak of Nipah virus, another deadly pathogen spread from animals to people. “We knew anything could happen at any time,” she says.

By 24 January, Shailaja had called a meeting of her rapid response team, set up a control room, and mobilized surveillance teams. On 27 January, the first group of students flew back from Wuhan. Three days later, one of them tested positive for COVID-19, becoming India’s first confirmed case.

It is to her credit that only 0.36% of confirmed cases have died, a mortality rate that is among the lowest in the world and reflects both Kerala’s young population and high-quality health care. The magazine, quoting virologist Shahid Jameel, director of Ashoka University’s Trivedi School of Biosciences, says “In many ways, [Kerala] got it right. They possibly got it right the most of any Indian State.”

Much of the credit goes to Kerala’s calm and cheerful Health Minister, often called “Shailaja Teacher” because of her old job as a high school teacher. Although Kerala benefited from historical advantages including the country’s highest literacy rates and arguably its best primary health care system, experts say Shailaja’s leadership has been critical. “She listens to people, she visits hospitals privately, she talks to doctors,” says K. Srinath Reddy, director of the Public Health Foundation of India. “She comes across as a person who is blessed both in ability and humility.”

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According to Johnson, coronavirus could become more virulent in winter, and the works of NHS will become more challenging to cope up the rise in positive cases.

“Demand for testing is not the only challenge that winter will bring. It’s possible that the virus will be more virulent in the winter months and it’s certain that the NHS will face the usual annual winter pressures,” said Johnson.

A few weeks back, Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health had warned that the real chaos associated with COVID-19 is yet to unfold. According to Jha, the coronavirus outbreak is still in its early stages, and the pandemic could challenge the entire healthcare sector if it starts spreading in rural areas.

It should be noted that coronavirus had initially spread among people in urban areas, and now, the pandemic has slowly started affecting people living in suburbs and rural areas.

“The nature of this pandemic is that it starts and kind of accelerates in big cities, but then it moves out into the suburbs and into the rural areas. So, by the time we’re done with this, I think every American will have felt it much more up close and personal. That’s what I worry about — that it shouldn’t have to take that for people to really understand how tragic this is and how calamitous in many ways this is,” said Jha.

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