Lord Ridley claims Trump’s WHO executive order won’t impact efforts to uncover Covid-19’s origins (Image: Getty )
’s looming withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) will not impact the global search for the origins of COVID-19, a former Tory peer has claimed.
pulled the US out of the international health body, in one of by the new president.
The order said the withdrawal was “due to the organization’s mishandling of the pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms”.
Lord Matthew Ridley, a former Tory peer and author of ‘Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19’, agrees that the WHO has not played its part in establishing how the virus that killed millions of people worldwide first emerged.
He told the Daily Express: “I kept asking the British Government to investigate the origin of Covid but it kept saying it was leaving the matter to the WHO.
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Trump signed dozens of executive orders in his first day in charge (Image: Getty)
“That’s why the WHO’s failure to investigate properly did such harm. Its latest effort, the SAGO committee, has discovered nothing useful in three years.”
The most common explanation for COVID-19’s origin is that it was passed on to humans from an animal host at a Wuhan wet market.
However, many scientists and intelligence officials have accused the Chinese Government of manipulating Covid research since the outbreak, while not sharing vital info with the West. Some have even claimed the virus could have leaked from a lab.
But any breakthroughs putting the world a step closer to discovering how the virus emerged have, Lord Ridley claimed.
“Almost all the key information came from other sources,” he said.
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Lord Ridley added: “I do not think America leaving the WHO will change the situation either way: the WHO is unfortunately all but irrelevant to the greatest medical question of the century.”
The move may still hamper efforts to investigate the virus, given the huge funding the US previously poured into the agency under the Biden administration.
The US remained the organisation’s largest funder throughout Joe Biden’s presidency, contributing almost one-fifth of its $6.8billion (£5.5billion) annual budget.
Covid is not the only virus the organisation is monitoring. Experts have warned that a US withdrawal could have a devastating impact on the WHO’s ability to respond to emergencies like an Ebola outbreak, or MPOX, or another pandemic.
However, the US cannot leave the international body until it receives approval from Congress.
Washington also still needs to meet its financial obligations to the WHO for the current fiscal year, as well as see out a one-year notice period before leaving.
The Daily Express has approached the WHO for comment.