Coronavirus happened ‘naturally’, not in a lab: WHO

The coronavirus is something that has happened naturally, the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reiterated on Friday.

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“WHO believes in science and evidence and that’s why we say science, solutions and solidarity. And our colleague, I think the person who asked from India, said, there was a media interview that someone saying that the virus came from a lab,” said Tedros at a press briefing.

But as far as we’re concerned, and so far, all the publications we have seen, the publications say it’s actually something, the virus has happened naturally. It came naturally. So these are all the publications we know,” he added.

At the press briefing, Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead on COVID-19 response at the WHO Health Emergencies Program, said based on previous studies of pathogens that have passed from animals to humans, the identification of the animals from which they originated and their intermediate hosts requires certain time and very detailed investigations.

If its source and intermediate hosts are not known, it may be transmitted to humans again, she said.

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