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Australia and New Zealand have some of the toughest travel bans in the world as part of their zero tolerance strategy for COVID-19.
Clark said countries that did nothing to travel in the beginning were badly affected and made the pandemic unstoppable because, by that time, it was “well and truly out of the bag.”
“And we never recovered,” she said.
The World Health Organization was criticized for being too close to China but ended up accepting an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus.Credit:PA
She wants the United Nations General Assembly to decide on a contemporary agenda for the WHO, but said it was being stifled by forces trying to keep control of any changes in Geneva, where it is headquartered.
“The International Health Regulations are timeless, they were written in 2005 before anything like the level of global connection through travel. And it’s not appropriate, when there’s a dangerous respiratory pathogen out there like this, to say you don’t have to travel anything – of course you do.
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Clark said it was “appalling” and an example of inertia that the World Health Assembly agreed in May to meet again in November “to consider developing a global WHO accord.”
“Elderly people from countries all over the world blew me up and said, what are they thinking, my country is falling apart and it will take them six months to talk about a convention? Clark mentioned.
“The jury is still absent” on a laboratory leak
Clark did not reject the theory that the virus could come from a lab leak, possibly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which specializes in bat research.
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She said there was “no solid evidence” for either theory, but there were three hypotheses.
These included the possibility that a researcher could be infected while collecting bat material in caves and material leaking during a transfer between two research facilities on the Wuhan virus, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the lesser-known Wuhan Center for Disease Control located near the Huanan Seafood Market. The market was originally identified as the source of the disease and the first group of infections reported.
And she said the leak could have come directly from the Institute of Virology because its biosafety protocols were “not of the highest standard.”
“All I’ll say is the jury’s out. I don’t think it should be seen as a geopolitically motivated attack to say the jury is out. Everyone wants to know and the more open and helpful China could be with it – the happier we will all be because we all have to learn from these things. “
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