The World Health Organization’s (WHO) member states, including China and the US, have adopted a joint resolution for a prompt independent inquiry into the global health response to the Covid-19 pandemic, including the actions of the agency, as the 73rd annual World Health Assembly concluded, reported Caixin.
The resolution, which emerged from the UN health body’s first-ever virtual summit, also requested the organization’s director to continue to work to identify the animal source of the virus as well as how it spread to humans, in collaboration with the World Organization for Animal Health, its Food and Agriculture Organization and member countries.
The WHO resolution bucked a trend that has seen China and the US butt heads at recent international summits over various stipulations in proposed multilateral agreements, in several cases resulting in no final recommendations being made.
“We applaud the call for an impartial, independent, and comprehensive review of the WHO’s response, to be undertaken in consultation with Member States, and we urge that work to begin now,” read a Tuesday statement published by the US Mission in Geneva. “We further appreciate the mandate given by the resolution to the WHO to investigate the origins of the virus, and we are confident that through this knowledge, researchers and medical practitioners around the world will be empowered in the pursuit of vaccines and other countermeasures.”
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