WHO experts say virus didn’t come from lab, sparking stronger controversy

WHO Expert Mission Visits Wuhan Virus Institute on February 3

The question of whether the virus was leaked from the Wuhan Virus Institute has once again become the focus of attention as a WHO expert mission is in Wuhan, China, to trace the origin of the Wuhan pneumonia virus. Although the mission visited the Wuhan Institute on Feb. 3 and said there was no evidence that the virus came from the laboratory, there are still questions about whether the virus was intentionally or unintentionally leaked from the Wuhan Institute, as well as about the close ties between the Wuhan Institute and the Chinese Communist military.

After the WHO panel of experts visited the Wuhan Institute on Feb. 3, Peter Daszak, a member of the panel and president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, said on his personal Twitter account that he had an extremely important meeting with Wuhan Institute personnel, including Shi Zhengli, on Feb. 3, saying that there were questions and answers on a number of key issues.

Dasak also told Reuters that there was no evidence that the virus came from the lab, but he did not further explain his original reason for this conclusion. He claimed that the virus may have been spreading long before it appeared in Wuhan. What the team now needs to do is go from tracing patient zero to why the virus has an animal host. However, he also pointed out that due to the complexity of the virus traceability, if you want to find out the answer may take months, or even years.

The former White House deputy national security adviser again mentioned that the virus is related to the Wuhan Institute of Virus

While members of the WHO panel made the aforementioned conclusions, Matt Pottinger, a former White House deputy national security adviser and current Hoover Institution visiting scholar, spoke at a Feb. 3 web event hosted by The Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University. Public Affairs) hosted a networking event, he again addressed the notion that the origin of the new coronavirus (also known as the Chinese Communist virus, COVID-19) is linked to the Wuhan Virus Institute, stating, “We had published a list of facts that there was a flu-like illness within the Wuhan Virus Institute in November 2019; in addition, there is a new information about the role played by the Chinese Communist military at the Wuhan Institute of Virus, which had never been disclosed before.”

According to Radio Free Asia, the list Booming refers to is a fact sheet entitled “Activities of the Wuhan Virus Institute,” released by the State Department on January 15 before the Trump (Trump) administration left office, a report that is still available online.

The latter – the role played by the Chinese Communist military at the Wuhan Virus Institute – has been secretly collaborating with the Wuhan Virus Institute since 2017.

According to public information on the official website of the Wuhan Institute of Virus, in 2015, Wuhan Institute of Virus researcher Wang Hanzhong, in cooperation with the Communist Party’s Military Hospital 302 and the Institute of Microbial Epidemiology of the Communist Party’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences, completed the project “Research on the pathogens and prevention and control technologies of emerging viral infectious diseases of the respiratory and intestinal tracts The project was awarded the first prize for medical achievements of the Chinese Communist Army.

Official U.S. documents also confirm that the Institute has collaborated with the Chinese Communist military on publications and secret projects. And since 2017, the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research has been conducting classified research on behalf of the Chinese Communist military, including laboratory animal experiments.

Although members of the current WHO panel say there is no evidence that the virus came from a laboratory, Shi Zhengli had self-doubts during the early stages of the outbreak, in addition to concerns within U.S. officials as early as 2018.

In an interview with the monthly Scientific American last February, Shi Zhengli revealed that when she was called back to Wuhan in a hurry on Dec. 30, 2019, her first thought was, “Could the virus have come out of our lab?”

At that Time, the viral samples of two patients with suspected SARS had been sent to the Virus Institute. On her way back to Wuhan from Shanghai, she wondered uneasily, “Did the Hubei health Bureau make a mistake? Did it come from our laboratory?”

Given the widely held belief that Beijing has an ambiguous relationship with WHO, and the fact that WHO experts were allowed to enter China to trace the virus only a year after the Wuhan pneumonia outbreak, there have been questions about the effectiveness of the findings.

The effectiveness of the WHO’s findings has been widely questioned

Teng Biao, an adjunct professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York, told the Voice of America that a late and rushed investigation into the traceability of the virus would be difficult to uncover the truth about the virus. “The best time to investigate has long passed. The next thing is to put up a lot of obstacles and maybe a lot of work on the selection of experts. Also there are some sources that doubt the independence of some of these experts… It’s very difficult for us to draw real conclusions from this short and already late investigation, to uncover the truth about the virus.”

At the same time, he also pointed out that the Chinese Communist government is treating this originally health Epidemic issue as a political issue, which is determined by such a political system of the Communist Party. It must politicize this matter and link it to its political performance, political legitimacy and political stability. So it kept putting up obstacles to cover up the truth after the outbreak, and obstructed the World Health Organization’s investigation, and did not allow some experts from the World Health Organization to investigate until the outbreak was over a year old.

Zhihong Wang, director of the Center for Preventive Medicine Research at Stanford University, told Deutsche Welle that it had been more than a year since the virus began spreading from the South China seafood market, and that if WHO experts wanted to find the original path of transmission in the market, it would be difficult to know from which animals in the market the new coronavirus might have been transmitted indirectly to humans in the first place.

At the same time, Wang Zhihong also believes that the last thing WHO wants to see when it comes to Wuhan to investigate the origin of the CCP virus is for the inspection report to be deemed worthless by all sectors. “But if the final report issued by WHO experts does not gain the trust of the public, then the credibility of WHO is at stake.”

Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington think tank, also said the two-week visit was not enough time for WHO experts in Wuhan to reach a conclusion on the origin of the Chinese Communist virus. Huang also said that if the WHO had been persistent in requesting information about the virus from the Chinese Communist Party at the beginning of the outbreak, they might have been able to issue a warning to the world earlier.

It has also been noted that the WHO expert mission’s itinerary was tightly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, which prohibited them from contacting and talking to the media and the community. In an interview with the Associated Press on March 3, Dasak, one of the WHO experts, praised the Chinese side for its “openness” and “cooperation,” but admitted that the mission had to report to the Chinese Communist Party by email two days in advance if it wanted to ask sensitive questions of local people in order to to get approval.

The Chinese government did not recognize the WHO team’s trip as a retrospective investigation of the virus. For example, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said that this was “an exchange and cooperation between international experts and Chinese experts in related fields on the traceability of the CCP virus, which is part of a global study, not an investigation.