WHO Warned That No Silver Bullet for COVID-19

The World Health Organization (WHO) warned that there might never be a “silver bullet” for the new coronavirus, despite the push to get effective vaccines.

The WHO urged governments and citizens to specialise in doing the known basics, like testing, contact tracing, maintaining physical distance and wearing a mask so as to suppress the pandemic, which has upended normal life around the globe and triggered a devastating depression.

“We all hope to possess a variety of effective vaccines which will help prevent people from infection,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual news conference.

“However, there’s no solution at the instant — and there might never be.”

“For now, stopping outbreaks comes right down to the fundamentals of public health and disease control.

“Do it all,” he urged. The novel coronavirus has killed nearly 6,90,000 people and infected a minimum of 18.1 million since the outbreak emerged in Wuhan in China last December, consistent with a tally from official sources compiled by AFP.

The CHINA Approach of WHO 

The WHO began pressing China in early May to ask in its experts to assist investigate the animal origins of Covid-19.

The UN health agency sent an epidemiologist and an animal health specialist to Beijing on July 10 to get the groundwork for a search aimed toward identifying how the virus entered the human species.

Their scoping mission is now complete, said Tedros.

“The WHO advance team that travelled to China has now concluded their mission to get the groundwork for further joint efforts to spot the virus origins,” he said.

“WHO and Chinese experts have drafted the terms of reference for the studies and programme of labor for a world team, led by WHO. “The international team will include leading scientists and researchers from China and round the world.

“Epidemiological studies will begin in Wuhan to spot the potential source of infection of the first cases.

“Evidence and hypotheses generated through this work will lay the bottom for further, longer-term studies.”

The pair haven't yet returned to the WHO’s Geneva headquarters for a debriefing.

Scientists believe the killer virus jumped from animals to humans, possibly from a market within the city of Wuhan selling exotic animals for meat.

Chinese officials said early within the outbreak that the virus may have spread from a market within the city, which sold live and wild animals, but no further confirmation of that has been revealed.