WHO Report Says COVID Origins Uncertain, Beijing Withholding Information

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Jul 1, 2025 - 10:04 Updated: Jun 30, 2025 - 16:43
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WHO Report Says COVID Origins Uncertain, Beijing Withholding Information

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A panel of World Health Organization (WHO) experts said they were not able to draw a conclusion on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic as the Chinese regime is still withholding information.

In a report published on Friday, the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), a 27-strong expert panel established by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in November 2021, called on “governments—especially those where the earliest human cases were confirmed,” to share information.

“As things stand, all hypotheses must remain on the table, including zoonotic spillover and lab leak,” Ghebreyesus said at a press briefing.

“We continue to appeal to China and any other country that has information about the origins of COVID-19 to share that information openly, in the interests of protecting the world from future pandemics,” he added.

According to the WHO, between December 2019 and May 2023, COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, led to more than 7 million deaths globally.

The first known cases came from Wuhan in central China but patient zero has never been identified.
Local health officials first suspected the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan City to be the source of the disease, saying that “most” of the initial patients were linked to the market, but a paper published in the Lancet in January 2020 said almost a third of the initial cases were not connected to the market.
Wuhan also hosts the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which received more than $1 million U.S. funding to experiment on bat coronaviruses. This and the Chinese regime’s cover up of early outbreaks, along with other circumstantial evidence, has fueled suspicion that the virus was leaked from the institute.
In May 2023, George Gao, who headed the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) during the COVID-19 pandemic, told the BBC that Chinese officials had investigated WIV to find out whether SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from the lab, and found no wrongdoing.

He said the China CDC was not involved in the investigation and did not disclose any details about which Chinese departments had conducted the probe.

In the SAGO report published on Friday, the authors said that available evidence reviewed by the panel “suggests zoonotic spillover of SARS-CoV-2 into the human population, either directly from bats or through an intermediate host,” but, without all the information, they can’t conclude when and when this may have happened.

The report said SAGO and WHO have requested more information from China, including more than 500 sequences from early COVID-19 patients, more detailed information on animals sold at wet markets in Wuhan, and information on laboratories in Wuhan, including the staff health records, biosafety, and biosecurity information of WIV and the China CDC’s lab in Wuhan.

“As a result, SAGO has been unable to adequately assess this route for human infection and therefore is not in a position to rule this out as a possibility,” it added.

In January this year, the CIA said it assessed that the COVID-19 pandemic “more likely” came from a lab, joining the FBI and the U.S. Energy Department in their previous conclusions.

In April, the Trump administration endorsed the lab lead theory by changing a White House COVID-19 website to to say a lab is “the most likely origin of COVID-19.”

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