Irish Examiner view: WHO access to Wuhan data vital in effort to avoid  threat from next pandemic

File image of a worker in protective coverings directing members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team on their arrival at the airport in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province, last year. Picture: AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File

It is just over a year since the World Health Organization (WHO) made its last visit to China in an attempt to isolate the causes of the coronavirus that has wreaked such havoc.

Further requests to return to Wuhan to pursue a hypothesis that the virus leaked from a laboratory have been denied by Chinese authorities as “not scientific”.

The WHO’s team of international experts, working with Chinese colleagues, made their first visit in January 2021 — more than 12 months after a mysterious pneumonia was detected.

They spent more than a month in the city visiting the Huanan Seafood Market and research labs investigating viruses from bats, which are still viewed as a suspected animal host for Covid-19.

Scientists like to warn that it can “take years or even decades to find the cause of a new infectious disease”. However, in a world where accusations are made almost daily that the pandemic may have been created by genetic tinkering, this is not going to be a satisfactory answer.

The WHO report from last March concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that Covid-19 could have been caused by a lab accident and that the balance of probability was that it jumped from bats to humans via some intermediary animal.

However, one year on, scientists aside, many people find this explanation unconvincing. The pathway animal has not been identified. There is still no firm conclusion, despite the attention of some of the best brains in the world. The evolutionary history of coronaviruses and the way they generate genetic variants is a central concern as society starts to dismantle its current defences against the pandemic that we have come to know and hate.

That the answer partly lies somewhere in the Petri dishes and virological records of China seems beyond argument. It is also inevitable that Chinese secrecy and obfuscation will stoke the suspicions of the rest of the world.

Closer international collaboration is vital to reduce the risk of the next pandemic and prevent pathogens and viruses jumping between species. Twelve months after the last mission to Wuhan, such mutual support seems no closer.