WHO expert group fails to find a definitive answer for how COVID-19 began
LONDON (AP) — An expert group charged by the World Health Organization to investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic started released its final report Friday, reaching an unsatisfying conclusion: Scientists still aren't sure how the worst health emergency in a century began.
At a press briefing on Friday, Marietjie Venter, the group's chair, said that most scientific data supports the hypothesis that the new coronavirus jumped to humans from animals.
That was also the
conclusion
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
lab accident
, 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
20 million people
, wiped at least $10 trillion from the global economy and upended the lives of billions.
Last year, the
AP found
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
U.S. intelligence analysis
found there was insufficient evidence to prove the theory.
Chinese officials
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
short list of animals
they think might have spread COVID-19 to humans, including racoon dogs, civet cats and bamboo rats.
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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.
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Covid origins investigation inconclusive, says WHO
A long-running World Health Organization investigation into the origins of Covid-19 has been unable to conclude where the virus came from because of a refusal to share information by China and intelligence agencies. An independent panel found that the most likely scientific explanation for the emergence of Covid-19 was direct transmission from bats to humans, or via an intermediary animal sold at the Wuhan wet market where the first cases emerged in December 2019, the WHO announced on Friday. 'Most scientific data and accessible published scientific evidence currently supports this hypothesis, however [we] are not currently able to conclude when, where and how Sars Cov-2 entered the human population,' Dr Marietjie Venter, Chair The Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), told a press conference. Dr Venter added that the Wuhan Huanan seafood market had played a 'significant role' in the spread of the virus, and that 60 per cent of early cases could conclusively be traced back to the site. She added that no widespread human or animal cases had been recorded anywhere else before December 2019. The pandemic killed an estimated 20 million people while shredding economies and crippling health systems, according to the WHO. Understanding its origins is seen as key to preventing future pandemics. The panel was unable to rule out the possibility that the virus emerged from a laboratory leak in Wuhan due to a lack of cooperation from Chinese authorities and other governments who had been unwilling to share intelligence reports, the health agency said. 'Much of the information needed to investigate this hypothesis has not been made available to WHO or SAGO, despite repeated requests to the government of China,' said Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus, the WHO's Director General. 'Despite our repeated requests, China hasn't provided hundreds of viral sequences from individuals with Covid-19 early in the pandemic, more detailed information on animals sold at markets in Wuhan, and information on work done and biosafety conditions at laboratories in Wuhan,' he said. The CIA said in January that Covid-19 was 'more likely' to have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a highly secure laboratory located in the heart of the city where the first cases of Covid-19 were recorded, than to have come from animals. Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, believes there is an 80-90 per cent chance that coronavirus accidentally leaked from a Chinese lab, German media reported earlier this year. Dr Tedros said: 'WHO is also aware of intelligence reports performed by other governments around the world on the origins of Covid-19, we have also requested access to those reports [....] and have not had access to [them] or their underlying data.' As well as the lab leak and zoonotic spillover explanations, the committee also investigated two other hypotheses. One, which was promoted by Beijing in the early days of the pandemic, is the claim that Covid-19 was transmitted via frozen food products imported into China. Dr Venter said that 'more data is required to prove this hypothesis'. A fourth theory – popular on social media – is that the pandemic was the result of a deliberate laboratory manipulation of the virus. 'SAGO analysed the genomic structure of the virus and did not find scientific evidence supporting this hypothesis. There's also evidence that these mutations and recombinations occur in nature,' Dr Venter said. The WHO's efforts to uncover the origins of Covid have long been shrouded in doubt, largely because of China's refusal to share information with investigators. After four years of investigation, 'all hypotheses remain on the table,' said Dr Tedros. He added that the WHO continued to appeal to Beijing and other countries with information about the origins of Covid-19 to share the information openly, in the interests of protecting the world from future pandemics. The full SAGO report was published on Friday. Its authors concluded that 'although evidence exists that has improved our understanding of the early and subsequent evolution of the virus in humans and animals, significant data gaps remain which preclude SAGO from concluding with certainty how SARS-CoV-2 initially entered the human population'. The panel urged China and the global scientific community to 'prioritise further work on understanding the origins of Covid-19 and for all countries to comprehensively study future emergences of unknown pathogens'. The full SAGO report was being published on Friday. Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
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A Swiss village was buried under a mountain. This town could be next.
In the past century, scientists have observed more rockfalls and avalanches in the Alps, a looming threat to nearby villages. In this aerial view, rubble and ice fill a portion of the Loetschental Valley following a landslide on June 3, 2025 in Blatten, Switzerland. Over 317 million cubic feet of rubble, mud, and ice fell on to Blatten on May 28. Photograph by Robert Hradil, Getty Images Last month, Lukas Kalbermatten-Ritler stood in a hamlet overlooking the small Swiss village of Blatten opposite the Birch Glacier, holding up his camera phone up in disbelief. 'It was like a bomb went off,' says Kalbermatten-Ritler, who's home and historic third-generation family-owned Hotel Edelweiss was destroyed on May 28. 'There were black rocks coming like a wall over the glacier, like it was a big hand taking the village. This was the moment I stopped filming. I didn't want to film when my village was falling.' It took 28 seconds for the landslide from the collapse of the glacier to cover 600-year-old wooden homes in one of Switzerland's oldest and most picturesque valley villages in hard brown, cold sandpaper sludge that will be sinking for years. The collapse was so powerful it registered as a 3.1 magnitude earthquake. It was a village that scientists never expected to see almost completely buried by 328 million cubic feet of falling rock and ice. Destroyed houses float in the water from the river Lonza that formed a lake beside the massive avalanche, triggered by the collapse of the Birch Glacier. Photograph by Michael Buholzer, Keystone/AP A house is submerged in water following a glacier collapse. Photograph by Michael Buholzer, Keystone/AP Yet there are others, like Kandersteg, a Swiss tourist town nine miles away that scientists watch anxiously. It sits in the shadow of an unstable cliffside called Spitze Stei could trigger a landslide with twice the ice and rock debris that flattened Blatten. Scientists say it should have fallen by now. 'We can't predict exactly when disasters like this will happen,' says Matthias Huss, senior glaciologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and director of the Swiss glacier monitoring network. Even with the best rockfall, landslide, and avalanche monitoring systems in the world, Alpine towns remain in uncertain danger. Magazine for all ages starting at $25/year In the worst-case scenario, over 700 million cubic feet of limestone and marl will come crashing down into Lake Oeschinen, itself a result of landslides 3,200 years ago. The splash would send a wave 2.5 miles into the center of Kandersteg, covering around 25 percent of the town, including hotels, homes, and the school. Other less-severe, likelier, models show smaller, still destructive debris flows surpassing safety dams built by the village, according to Nils Hahlen, head of the natural hazard division for the Office of Forest and Natural Hazards in the Swiss canton, or state, of Bern. The landslide that devastated the town of Blatten was unexpected. In other, nearby villages, scientists have identified unstable cliff faces that might trigger similar tides of rock, water, and debris in the future. Photograph by Michael Buholzer, Keystone/AP 'But mountain people are robust. They don't move out of their villages because of changing threats unless authorities decide it's too risky to stay,' says Markus Stoffel, a geomorphologist at the University of Geneva who grew up near Blatten and Kandersteg. Most of the town's 1,300 residents remain. On mountain watch Four hours into what was billed as a 'short' (eight-mile) hike, I rest on a mossy stump while my 75-year-old mountain guide smokes a pipe. Mountain guides don't eat much, Fritz Loretan tells me. He's also a man of few words (clocking it down the trail in loafer sneakers with no tread), and when he talks about the looming threat in Kandersteg, he explains: 'When you grow up in the mountains, then you are used to them, and you won't feel safe in other places.' In 2018, while paragliding over Spitze Stei, Loretan's friend saw 'a cut in the mountain,' and alerted authorities. Experts realized the outer rock section could fall at any moment. That was the year Spitze Stei became the most watched rock in Switzerland via high-tech drones, radar surveys, GPS, and cameras. 'At Spitze Stei the main water sources are snowmelt and rain. The exact amount of water in the mountain is one of the unknown factors,' says Hahlen. Since Earth's last ice age, rockfaces have been routinely dislodged from Alpine peaks as a result of natural movement. But in the past century, scientists have seen more rockfalls and avalanches. Glaciers and permafrost—the high-altitude frozen soil, rock, and sediment that acts like glue to hold the mountains together—are melting as a result of the warming temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions. A view of a landslide in Brienz, three days apart, from November of last year. As the region warms, ice and frozen soil are melting and unsticking the glue that once held parts of the mountain together. Photograph by Gian Ehrenzeller, Keystone/AP (Top) (Left) and Photograph by Gian Ehrenzeller, Keystone/AP (Bottom) (Right) As this icy glue melts, it allows water to penetrate cracks in the mountain, build pressure, and eventually rupture, triggering more frequent and severe landslides, rockslides, rockfalls, and avalanches, especially after intense rain and snow, another hazard of warming temperatures. 'In the next few years and decades, we expect an increase in risk from permafrost rock,' says Felix Pfluger, chair of landslide research at the Technical University of Munich. While catastrophic rock and snow fall can go virtually unnoticed in the remote regions of Alaska, Siberia, or northern Canada, they're an existential threat to many Alpine communities. The landslide that covered Blatten isn't the first tragedy in the Alps from a rockfall. This past June, residents of the Swiss village of Brienz/Brinzauls evacuated for the fourth time in two years from a rockslide threat (after debris stopped just shy of the village in 2023). Eight hikers and ten homes in the valley of Bondo didn't survive a devastating landslide in 2017. Stoffel says he expects more chain-reaction disasters with bigger consequences in the Alps—rock avalanches overloading glacier ice and causing it to liquify and slide down the slope, like in Blatten. His research shows 'a clear tendency for such [catastrophic chain-reaction] events to become more frequent in a warming world,' he says. '...especially after heavy rain.' A view of Kandersteg, Switzerland in October, 2023. While the region is being closely monitored, it remains safe. Photograph by Noemie Vieillard, Hans Lucas/Redux 'If you ask the older people in the village, they'll tell you there was always falling debris,' says Kandersteg's Mayor Maeder René-François. Growing up in Kandersteg, he remembers poking a pole into the cracks between ice and snow to search for bodies after an avalanche took out half a hotel in high season. There's a long history of rockfall and landslides, he says, as recent as 2023 and even this past May five died here in an avalanche. 'With climate change, it's happening faster. It rains harder, the days are hotter, and the fog sets in thicker over the mountain,' he says. 'But people here are not scared, it's life in the mountains. They respect that they must act in the correct way and follow the evacuation plan.' Since 2021, Kandersteg has enforced a ban on all new construction to minimize potential damage in the village district, closed a section of town, and built dams to reroute lake water. 'Big disasters normally start smaller. Instabilities with rock fall over a certain time start with cracks opening. A mountain doesn't just disappear out of the blue. There are always precursor signs,' says Stoffel. 'And if you take them seriously and observe the changes continuously, then, then you may not be able to protect the buildings or the village, but you can save lives.' While no one knows exactly when or what section of Spitze Stei will start sliding down the mountain, when it starts to crumble, residents and tourists should have at least 24 to 48 hours to evacuate. On a warm mid-June day, I followed tourists with hiking packs and poles to a mountain chalet built in 1880 and pulled up a lunch chair under an apple-red umbrella that matched a nearby Swiss flag and took in the brilliant turquoise of Lake Oeschinen–glistening and undisturbed by falling rocks, for now. Swimmers and paddlers snap selfies; a bride and groom pose by cows grazing near a roped-off section of the beach—their bells clanging measure with the chirping birds. 'None of them know they're right under it,' my server, David Brunoldi, told me when I asked him which rock is Spitze Stei. He points to the 9,800-foot frosty peak above us. 'More rocks are coming down every day.' Brunoldi says mountain people stay in Kandersteg for generations because it's home. On this picture-perfect, rugged Alpine terrain, where rockfall has always been a risk, his grandfather worked and died on a mountain train. Last year alone, an increasing 2.8 million cubic feet of rock crumbled down into the lake. 'No need to worry though, Brunoldi adds. 'It's not falling today.'
