Tag: origins

Categories
Politics

U.S. intelligence businesses are divided over virus origins

U.S. intelligence agencies are divided over virus origins

Security guards stand outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan while members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus visit the institute in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, on February 3, 2021.

Hector Retamal | AFP | Getty Images

WASHINGTON – U.S. Intelligence said it was divided over the exact origin of Covid-19 in China, a revelation three months after President Joe Biden requested a more in-depth review.

A secret service said it had reasonable confidence that the virus infected people following a lab-related incident, according to a report released Friday afternoon. Four agencies said they had weak assessments that the virus was of natural origin.

The report did not name the agencies.

“However, after reviewing all available intelligence reports and other information, the IC remains divided on the most likely origin of Covid-19. All authorities believe two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-related incident. ”The country’s 18 intelligence agencies wrote in the report.

The report, compiled by the Office of the Director of the National Intelligence Service, found that the virus was not designed as a biological weapon. The intelligence agency also found that Chinese officials had no prior knowledge of the virus prior to the first outbreak that sparked a global pandemic.

The report says that if the intelligence services stop receiving more information, they will not be able to come to a more definitive conclusion.

Biden said in a statement following the report’s release the U.S. and its allies would continue to pressure China to reveal more about what happened when Covid first began to spread.

“There is critical information in the People’s Republic of China about the origins of this pandemic, but from the beginning, government officials in China have worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing it,” Biden said.

“The world deserves answers and I will not rest until we get them,” added the president.

In May, Biden urged intelligence agencies to “redouble their efforts” within 90 days in hopes of finding a “definitive conclusion” about the origin of the virus.

The country’s secret services assume that Covid was exposed for the first time near the city of Wuhan in the Chinese province of Hubei in November 2019. The first known case group was reported in December.

After the first case was reported in the United States in January 2020, the virus has since infected more than 38 million Americans and killed more than 630,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins University. According to the JHU, more than 215 million people worldwide have been infected with the virus and around 4.5 million have died.

Earlier this week, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, of CNBC’s “Squawk Box”, said it was still unclear whether the virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.

“The extensive evidence from other perspectives says no, this was a naturally occurring virus,” said Collins. “Not to say that it couldn’t have been secretly examined at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and got out of there, we don’t know about it. But the virus itself doesn’t have the characteristics of being deliberately created by human labor.” . “

Collins added that the World Health Organization’s investigation into the origin of the coronavirus was made difficult by China’s refusal to participate.

“I think China basically refused to consider another WHO investigation and just said, ‘No, not interested,'” Collins told Squawk Box.

In July, China rejected a proposal from the WHO for a second phase investigation into the origin of the coronavirus, which would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan city.

“We will not accept such a tracing plan because it disregards common sense and science in some ways,” Zeng Yixin, vice minister of the National Health Commission, told reporters on July 22nd.

“We hope that the WHO will seriously review the deliberations and suggestions of Chinese experts and really treat the tracing of the Covid-19 virus as a scientific matter and remove political interference,” said Zeng.

– CNBC’s Rich Mendez contributed to this report from New York.

Categories
Health

contemporary calls to analyze the origins of covid

fresh calls to investigate the origins of covid

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting with a bipartisan group of members of Congress.

Pool | Getty Images News | Getty Images

LONDON — The European Union and the United States are expected to call for more progress on an investigation into the origins of Covid-19, according to a draft EU document.

The draft document, seen by CNBC, is the foundation for the outcome of an upcoming summit between U.S. President Joe Biden and European leaders which is due on Tuesday. Its wording could change right up until the end of the meeting. 

Speaking Thursday, European Council President Charles Michel, who chairs European summits, said: “The world has the right to know exactly what happened, in order to be able to learn the lessons.”

We have to know where it did come from.

Ursula von der Leyen

European Commission president

At the same news conference on Thursday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said: “It is of utmost importance that we learn about the origin of the coronavirus.”

“There is this horrible pandemic, a global pandemic we have to know where it did come from in order to draw the right lessons and to develop the right tools to make sure that this will never happen again and, therefore, the investigators need complete access to whatever is necessary to really find the source of this pandemic,” she added.

These statements follow Biden’s call last month for the World Health Organization to carry out a second phase of a probe into the origins of the virus, which was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.

A WHO report said earlier this year that the most likely cause of the virus was natural, and dismissed a lab leak theory. But it suggested that further studies would need to be carried out.

The U.S. intelligence community said last month that it “does not know exactly where, when, or how the Covid-19 virus was transmitted initially but has coalesced around two likely scenarios: either it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals or it was a laboratory accident.”

The discussion on the origins of the coronavirus comes at a time when the U.S. and the EU also intend to talk about their broader relationship with China.

While on the one hand, the U.S. and the EU want to criticize what they describe as human rights violations in China; on the other hand, they want Beijing to engage constructively on climate change policies and to open up certain parts of its economy.

Biden is hoping that the EU will be a partner when it deals with China over the coming years.

“Biden believes that with a broad coalition, you may be able to push China down a more constructive path. International pressure, that is pressure not coming from Washington only, could prove useful on any of these topics,” Jeremy Ghez, associate professor at H.E.C. Business School in Paris, told CNBC last week.

The EU decided in March to put on hold the ratification of an investment agreement with Beijing — a deal that had been presented back in December, just weeks before the inauguration of Biden.

This investment partnership is now frozen following a diplomatic row between Brussels and Beijing. In March, the EU decided to impose sanctions against China for its treatment of the ethnic minority Uyghurs and Beijing retaliated by announcing counter-sanctions against members of the European Parliament.

The ethnic Uyghurs, who live mostly in China’s west, have been identified by the United Nations, United States, United Kingdom and others as a repressed group. China’s Foreign Ministry in March characterized such claims as “malicious lies” designed to “smear China” and “frustrate China’s development.”

Categories
Health

Biden Orders Intelligence Inquiry Into Origins of the Coronavirus

Biden Orders Intelligence Inquiry Into Origins of the Coronavirus

The intelligence on the three workers came from outside the United States intelligence agencies’ own collection, which means its veracity is more difficult to authenticate. The source of the information was unclear, but several American officials said they believed the report that the three researchers got sick.

American intelligence officials do not know whether the lab workers contracted Covid-19 or some other disease, like a bad flu. If they did have the coronavirus, the intelligence may suggest that they could have become sick from the lab, but it also could simply mean that the virus was circulating in Wuhan earlier than the Chinese government has acknowledged.

Also toward the end of Mr. Trump’s term, State Department officials began examining the origins of the virus and concluded that it was highly unlikely to have appeared naturally and thus was likely the product of laboratory work.

CNN first reported the effort and suggested that the group’s efforts had been shut down by the Biden administration, prompting scathing Republican criticism. A State Department spokesman, Ned Price, denied that, saying that the team’s findings were briefed to senior officials in the department’s arms control bureau in February and March.

“With the report delivered, the work was ended,” Mr. Price said.

Mr. Trump issued a statement on Tuesday boasting of his early insistence that the Wuhan lab was the source of the virus. “To me, it was obvious from the beginning,” he said. “But I was badly criticized, as usual.”

Despite the absence of new evidence, a number of scientists have lately begun speaking out about the need to remain open to the possibility that the virus had accidentally emerged from a lab, perhaps after it was collected in nature, a lab origin distinct from a creation by scientists.

“It is most likely that this is a virus that arose naturally, but we cannot exclude the possibility of some kind of a lab accident,” Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told senators on Wednesday.

Categories
Politics

Biden orders nearer evaluation of Covid origins as U.S. intel weighs Wuhan lab leak concept

Biden orders closer review of Covid origins as U.S. intel weighs Wuhan lab leak theory

Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan as members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus make a visit to the institute in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province on February 3, 2021.

Hector Retamal | AFP | Getty Images

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced that he has ordered a closer intelligence review of what he said were two equally plausible scenarios of the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Biden revealed that earlier this year he tasked the Intelligence Community with preparing “a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of Covid-19, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.”

“As of today, the U.S. Intelligence Community has ‘coalesced around two likely scenarios’ but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question,” Biden said in a statement.

“Here is their current position: ‘while two elements in the IC leans toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter – each with low or moderate confidence – the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other,” said the president.

Biden used the Intelligence Community’s traditional language when they provide assessments to a president. This includes explaining to the president when different agencies within the IC disagree, and always giving the president the level of confidence they have in the accuracy of the raw intelligence.

Biden issued the new directives as the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, still officially unknown, come under increasing scrutiny.

The hypothesis that the virus may have escaped from a laboratory, while initially dismissed by some as a conspiracy theory, has in recent months gained more mainstream traction.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky last week said in Senate testimony that a lab-leak origin “certainly” was “one possibility.”

White House officials told reporters Tuesday that China hasn’t been “completely transparent” in the global investigation into the origins of Covid-19, and that a full investigation is needed to determine whether the virus that’s killed almost 3.5 million people came from nature or a lab.

“We need to get to the bottom of this, whatever the answer may be,” White House senior covid-19 advisor Andy Slavitt told reporters at a covid briefing Tuesday. “We need a completely transparent process from China, we need the [World Health Organization] to assist in that matter and we don’t feel like we have that now.”

The World Health Organization said in March that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus was introduced to humans through an accidental lab leak. But that report was heavily criticized by scientists who said the WHO gave the possibility of a lab accident short shrift compared with a natural-origin scenario..

“The report lacks crucial data, information, and access. It represents a partial and incomplete picture,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at the time when asked about WHO’s stance on Covid’s origins.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which leads the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies, did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not immediately respond to CNBC.

This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

—- CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger and Amanda Macias contributed to this story.

Categories
Health

Virus Origins Stay Unclear in W.H.O.-China Inquiry

Virus Origins Remain Unclear in W.H.O.-China Inquiry

For 27 days they searched for clues in Wuhan, visited hospitals, live animal markets and government laboratories, conducted interviews and pushed Chinese officials for data, but an international team of experts left the country far from understanding the origins of the coronavirus pandemic worldwide 2.8 million people killed.

The 124-page report of a joint World Health Organization-China investigation, due to be officially released on Tuesday and released to the media on Monday, contains a plethora of new details but no profound new evidence. And it does little to allay Western concerns about the role of the Chinese Communist Party, which is known to be resistant to outside control and has at times tried to prevent an investigation by the WHO. The report is also not clear whether China will allow outside experts to dig further.

“The investigation is in danger of getting nowhere and we may never find the true source of the virus,” said Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow on global health with the Council on Foreign Relations.

The report, the advance copy of which was obtained from the New York Times, said China still lacks the data or research to indicate how or when the virus began to spread. Some outside of the country skeptics say China may have more information than it admits.

The team of experts also dismissed the possibility that the virus accidentally emerged from a Chinese laboratory as “extremely unlikely,” although some scientists say this is an important question that needs to be investigated.

The Chinese government has tried to provide some level of access and cooperation, but has repeatedly tried to bend the investigation to its advantage. The report was co-authored by a WHO-selected team of 17 scientists from around the world and 17 Chinese scientists, many of whom hold official positions or work in government-run institutions, which has given Beijing great influence on its conclusions.

Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, said he was not convinced that a laboratory leak was extremely unlikely after seeing a copy of the report. He said he agreed that it was highly plausible that the virus would naturally have evolved to spread to humans, but he saw no reason in the report to rule out the possibility of a laboratory escape.

A member of the expert team, Peter Daszak, a British disease ecologist who heads the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based pandemic prevention group, backed down against criticism of the team’s work and collaboration in China. He said the laboratory leak hypothesis was “political from the start”. Dr. Daszak added that the WHO team was not constrained in its interviews with scientists who were on-site at the beginning of the pandemic.

He himself has been accused of having a conflict of interest for doing a past research on coronavirus with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what a disease ecologist should do.

“We were in the right place because we knew there was a risk of the virus occurring,” said Dr. Daszak. “We worked with that same viral group there and it happened.”

Updated

March 29, 2021, 2:06 p.m. ET

The prevailing theory remains that the virus came from bats, jumped to another animal, and then mutated in a way that allowed it to be transmitted to humans and from person to person. However, the process of tracing the origins of a virus is notoriously tedious.

To answer many of the remaining questions, the report recommends further retrospective studies of infections in humans, including the earliest cases, as well as further virus testing in farm animals and wildlife in China and Southeast Asia. It also calls for more detailed tracking of routes from farms to markets in Wuhan, which would require extensive interviews and blood tests for farmers, vendors and other workers.

It is unclear how much China will cooperate, however, and the country’s secretive and defensive behavior has helped fuel theories that were somehow responsible for starting the pandemic. Local officials in Wuhan first tried to hide the outbreak; Beijing has since expelled many Western journalists and put forward evidence-free theories about the virus originating elsewhere – although the earliest known cases were all in China and experts believe it almost certainly showed up there first.

“We have real concerns about the methodology and process that went into this report, including the fact that the Beijing government appears to have helped write it,” Foreign Secretary Antony J. Blinken said in a CNN interview that aired on Sunday.

China’s increasingly keen ties with the United States and other countries have also made investigation difficult. The Biden government has repeatedly criticized China’s lack of transparency, including its refusal to provide raw data on early Covid-19 cases to investigators during their visit to Wuhan. Chinese officials have resisted suggesting that the United States should welcome WHO to investigate the unsubstantiated theory that the virus may have originated in a US Army laboratory.

“We will never accept the baseless allegations and wanton denigration of the United States regarding the epidemic,” said Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, at a regular press conference in Beijing on Monday.

In bombastic news articles, Chinese propagandists have hailed the investigation as a sign of China’s openness to the world and as a justification for the government’s handling of the epidemic.

WHO has come under pressure to request more data and research from the Chinese government. However, the global health authority is inherently obliged to its member countries, which have not given the WHO team extensive powers to conduct forensic investigations into laboratory accidents in China, for example.

While much of the report was in-depth about molecular studies, virus development, and possible animal hosts, the section on the possibility of a laboratory leak was sketchy at best. While the animal origin of the virus is largely undisputed, some scientists claim that the virus could be collected and present in the laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, although Chinese scientists do not claim it is.

China’s lack of transparency and other concerns prompted a small group of non-WHO scientists to call for a new investigation into the origin of the pandemic this month. They said such an investigation should consider the possibility that the virus escaped from or infected someone in a laboratory in Wuhan.

The laboratory leak theory was promoted by a number of Trump administration officials, including Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, endorsed it in comments on CNN last week. He offered no evidence and insisted that it was his opinion; The theory has been largely rejected by scientists and US intelligence officials.

Matt Apuzzo and Apoorva Mandavilli contributed to the coverage. Albee Zhang contributed to the research.

Categories
Health

Some Scientists Query W.H.O. Inquiry Into the Coronavirus Pandemic’s Origins

Some Scientists Question W.H.O. Inquiry Into the Coronavirus Pandemic’s Origins

Asked to respond to the letter, Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for WHO, replied in an email that the team of experts that had traveled to China are working on his full report, as well as an accompanying summary report, which we understand will be issued simultaneously in a couple of weeks. “

The open letter indicated that the WHO study was a joint effort by a team of external experts selected by the global health organization and worked with Chinese scientists, and that the team’s report must be agreed upon by all. The letter stressed that the team had been denied access to some records and no laboratories in China were examined.

Updated

March 7, 2021, 3:06 p.m. ET

The team’s letter stated: “While this may be of limited use, it does not represent the official position of the WHO or the result of an unqualified, independent investigation.”

Without naming him, the letter criticized Peter Daszak, an expert on animal diseases and their links to human health, the head of the EcoHealth Alliance. In the letter that began with articles about Dr. Daszak was said to have previously expressed his belief that the virus was most likely to have a natural origin.

Dr. Daszak said the letter’s urge to investigate a laboratory origin for the virus was a position “supported by political agendas”.

“I urge the world community to wait for the WHO mission report to be published,” he added.

Filippa Lentzos, Lecturer in Science and International Security at King’s College London and one of the signatories to the letter, said: “I think to get a credible investigation, it has to be more of a global effort in the EU to feel that there is UN General Assembly should be brought where all the nations of the world are represented and can vote on whether or not to mandate the UN Secretary General to conduct this type of investigation. “

Categories
Health

W.H.O. Researcher on His Journey to China In search of Virus Origins

W.H.O. Researcher on His Trip to China Seeking Virus Origins

What about the cases that occurred before the fish market erupted?

There were other spreads outside of the Huanan market. There are other patients unrelated to the market, some in December. There were other markets. And we know that some of the patients have had connections with other markets. We have to keep working and then our Chinese colleagues have to keep working.

When we sat down as a group, on the last full day of work, the China team and WHO team said, “Let’s go over the hypotheses.” The route that received the most enthusiastic support was this route – wildlife through a domesticated wildlife association to Wuhan .

What is the next step?

It’s straightforward for the animal chain. The suppliers are known. You know the farm name; You know the owner of the farm. You have to go to the farm and interview the farmer and family. You have to test them. You have to test the community. You need to see if there are any animals left on nearby farms, if there are any signs of infection, and if there is any cross-border movement. If the virus is in these southern border states, it is possible that there has been movement in neighboring countries like Vietnam, Laos or Myanmar. We are now finding more and more related viruses. There is one in Japan and one in Cambodia, one in Thailand.

For the human side, look for previous cases, for clusters. If possible, check the blood banks for serum. Something like this is going to be sensitive in China and it will take some persuasion, diplomacy and energy to do because, to be honest, finding the source of this virus in China is not a high priority for the Chinese government think you. Anywhere this virus appears it is a political problem. That is one of the problems and that is clear and obvious to anyone who has looked at it.

Do you have a particular animal that you currently suspect as an intermediate link stronger than others?

It’s too high in the air. We don’t know if civets were for sale. We know they get infected very easily. We don’t know what the situation is with the mink farms in China or the other fur farms like raccoon dogs, although they are usually bred in a different part of China. That too needs to be followed up.

But if you were to say which route you put the most weight on, the virus would emerge from bats in either Southeast Asia or South China and end up on a domesticated game farm. I’ve been to many of them and they often have mixed species – civets, ferret badgers, raccoon dogs. These animals could be infected by bats.

Categories
Health

WHO outlines Wuhan findings on origins of Covid pandemic

WHO outlines Wuhan findings on origins of Covid pandemic

Peter Ben Embarek and Marion Koopmans (R) come to a press conference on February 9, 2021 to conclude a visit by an international team of experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) to the city of Wuhan in the Chinese province of Hefei.

HECTOR RETAMAL | AFP | Getty Images

An international team of scientists led by the World Health Organization said Tuesday that the search for the introduction of the coronavirus was still in progress. Further research is needed to investigate how and whether the disease circulated in animals prior to human infection.

Scientists have been working in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the disease was first identified, for four weeks, looking for clues to the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The research team has visited hospitals, laboratories, and markets including the Huanan Seafood Market, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the laboratory of the Wuhan Center for Disease Control.

During the secret visit, researchers were also supposed to speak to early responders and some of the early patients. The team completed two weeks of quarantine before starting visiting local locations.

Dr. Peter Ben Embarek, WHO food safety and animal diseases specialist and chairman of the investigation team, told a press conference that the “most likely” path for Covid is to transition from an intermediate species in humans. That hypothesis will “require more study and more specific (and) targeted research,” he said.

The first results of the investigation found no evidence of major Covid outbreaks in Wuhan or anywhere else before December 2019. However, researchers found evidence of wider Covid spread outside the Huanan seafood market in the same month, Ben Embarek said.

He added that it was not yet possible to determine the intermediate animal host for the coronavirus and described the results as “in the works” after nearly a month of meetings and site visits.

“To understand what happened in the early days of December 2019, we dramatically changed the image we had before? I don’t think so,” said Ben Embarek.

“Have we improved our understanding? Have we added details to this story? Absolutely,” he said.

WHO has tried to meet expectations for a definitive conclusion on the origins of the Covid pandemic. To put the mission in a broader context, it took more than a decade to find the origins of SARS, while the origins of Ebola – first identified in the 1970s – are not yet known.

It is hoped that information on the earliest known cases of the coronavirus, first discovered in Wuhan in late 2019, can help pinpoint the start of the outbreak and prevent similar pandemics in the future.

After concerns about access and delays in issuing visas, the team led by the World Health Organization arrived in Wuhan on January 14 to work with Chinese scientists to investigate the origin of the coronavirus.

Laboratory leak “extremely unlikely”

A theory that the coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been discredited by the research team. The hypothesis had been upheld by former President Donald Trump’s administration without any burden of proof and was strictly denied by Chinese officials.

“The hypothesis of a laboratory incident is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population,” said Ben Embarek. “Hence, it is not in the hypotheses that we will propose for future studies.”

Liang Wannian, head of the Covid expert panel at the Chinese National Health Commission, said on Tuesday, alongside Ben Embarek of the WHO from the Hilton Optics Valley Hotel in Wuhan, he agreed with this assessment.

The team had concluded that a laboratory leak should be considered extremely unlikely “on the basis of serious discussion and very careful research,” he added.

Mink are seen on a farm in Gjol, Northern Denmark on October 9, 2020.

HENNING BAGGER | Ritzau Scanpix | AFP via Getty Images

Liang said ongoing research into the origins of the virus needs to focus on how the virus circulated in animals before humans were infected.

Animal hosts have yet to be identified, but bats and pangolins are both potential candidates for transmission, Liang said, but samples from these species have not been found “sufficiently similar” to the Covid virus.

The high susceptibility of minks and cats to the Covid virus suggests that there may be other animals that act as reservoirs, Liang continued, but research is currently insufficient.

China’s national health commission spokesman said there could have been an unreported spread of the coronavirus before it was first discovered in Wuhan. However, Liang said there was no evidence of significant spread of Covid in Wuhan prior to the outbreak in late 2019.

International concern

The WHO previously cited genetic sequencing that showed the coronavirus had started in bats and likely jumped to another animal before infecting the human.

Many of the people who contracted the new virus in Wuhan, a city of around 11 million people, are said to have had connections to the Huanan fish market.

Scientists initially suspected the virus came from wildlife sold in the fish market, which prompted China to swiftly restrict public access to the market early last year.

China’s CDC has since said samples from the fish market suggest that the virus has spread from where the outbreak first occurred.

Additionally, China’s Liang said Tuesday that the Huanan Fish Market was one of the places where the coronavirus first appeared. However, he added that with current evidence it is impossible to determine how the virus was first introduced to the fish market.

Security guards stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan as members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus visit the institute in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, on February 3, 2021.

HECTOR RETAMAL | AFP | Getty Images

The origins of the coronavirus remain important as the virus is constantly evolving, as demonstrated by highly infectious mutant strains in the UK and South Africa.

To date, more than 106 million people worldwide have contracted the coronavirus and it has caused at least 2.32 million deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The US has by far reported the highest number of confirmed Covid cases and deaths, with more than 27 million reported infections and 465,072 deaths.

China has released little information about its research into the origins of the coronavirus, and there has been widespread international concern about what researchers in Wuhan are allowed to see and do as part of their research.

– CNBC’s Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report.