The director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, pledged to do "everything possible" to have an "answer" about the origin of Covid-19.

"There is a scientific and moral dimension to this problem, and we have to keep pressing until we get an answer," on the origin of the pandemic that began in China at the end of 2019, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the press in Geneva, quoted by the Sapo portal.

The director-general of the WHO said he had recently sent an official email to a high-ranking Chinese government official to ask for Beijing's cooperation again in trying to determine where and when the Covid-19 virus began to spread into the worst pandemic of the century.

An article in the scientific journal Nature published this week states that the WHO has given up on continuing the second phase of the investigation into the origins of the pandemic due to a lack of cooperation from the Chinese authorities.

Quoted in the article, Maria Van Kerkhove, who has been responsible at the WHO for fighting the pandemic since its inception, claimed that this statement was the result of "a mistake in the way information was disseminated".

"The WHO has not abandoned the study of the origin of Covid," she said at a press conference on Wednesday.

"We won't stop until we know the origins (...) which is increasingly difficult because, as time goes by, it becomes more complicated to understand what happened in the early stages of the pandemic," he added.

In February 2021, an interdisciplinary team of experts, led by the WHO and accompanied by Chinese colleagues, spent two weeks in the Asian country to scrutinize the start of the epidemic in Wuhan.

At the time, a joint report leaned towards the hypothesis of transmission to humans by an animal, possibly in a market in this Chinese city.

Defended by the US intelligence services during Donald Trump's administration and also by some scientists, another theory is that there was an "accident", i.e. that the virus "escaped" from a laboratory in Wuhan, where SARS CoV-2 coronaviruses are studied.

On February 14, 2023, the WHO officially counted 6.84 million deaths worldwide from Covid-19 and more than 756 million confirmed cases. The organization recognizes that the real numbers are much higher.