A World health Organization (WHO) expert panel, with the assistance of Chinese officials, has completed an initial investigation into the traceability of the novel coronavirus. They said on Tuesday that the frozen Food chain was also found to be one of the possible pathways of virus transmission, but the panel will not do further investigations on laboratory leaks of the virus in the future because the likelihood is extremely low. The conclusions reached by the WHO panel after its four-week visit to China are almost identical to the narrative being vigorously pushed by Chinese officials, so can such an investigation be trusted?
Accompanied by Liang Wannian, head of the Chinese expert team and director of the Department of Institutional Reform at the National Health Commission who jointly participated in the investigation and study, Peter Ben Embarek, a leading member of the WHO expert team, announced the preliminary conclusions they reached at a local press conference in Wuhan: “The hypothesis of a so-called accidental laboratory leak, which we investigated after finding that it is ‘extremely unlikely’ (extremely unlikely) that this was the pathway that caused the pandemic to occur; the virus can survive in a frozen state, but whether the virus was transmitted to humans in this way is inconclusive and warrants further investigation.”
Bainbari, a Danish-born expert on cross-species animal diseases, added at the press conference that bats are possible natural hosts and that transmission of the virus to humans through intermediate hosts remains the most likely route, but further research is needed.
Excluding laboratory leaks, the frozen food trade is a possible route of transmission, two ideas that Chinese officials have consistently stated since the outbreak, and this Time, through the mouths of foreign experts, are once again spreading to the world.
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The German pig’s foot, Norwegian salmon and even Russian frozen squid have all been questioned by Chinese officials as being responsible for the spread of the virus since the outbreak.
In October 2020, China’s General Administration of Customs said it had tested at least half a million cold-chain foods, seafood and meat alike.
The Wall Street Journal has noted that the Chinese government has repeatedly released news of viruses found on imported frozen food packaging, and that China’s approach to the spread of viruses in frozen foods is very different from that of other countries.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said that there is no evidence linking frozen foods to the spread of the virus and that the risk of infection through food or packaging is “very low.
Stephen Morrison, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, is an expert on global health policy research and a former member of the Clinton administration. He told Radio Free Asia, “I recognize the efforts of the WHO panel, which went through a very long and torturous process, and they were able to get the job done with China’s reluctant cooperation.”
However, he expects that “China continues to propagate and spread a lot of disinformation, saying rumors like the virus originated in a foreign country. I don’t think they will stop doing that.”
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According to Chinese media reports, Liang Wannian claimed at the press conference that the reason the virus could not have been leaked from the lab was because “there was no new coronavirus in the lab in Wuhan before,” and he also claimed that the lab had strict management measures in place.
However, this statement is completely contradictory to what Shi Zhengli, a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virus, said in an interview with foreign media.
Shi Zhengli revealed in an interview with the monthly Scientific American last February that her first thought when she learned of the Wuhan outbreak in late 2019 was, “Could the virus have gone out of the lab?” Her team tested virus samples from patients and created a genetic sequence of the virus, which was used to compare with thousands of coronavirus samples obtained from more than 15,000,000 bats in the laboratory for more than a decade, ruling out the possibility of leakage from the laboratory.
The Wuhan Virus Institute even calls itself the “Chinese Virus Herbarium” on its official website.
China initially welcomed the WHO experts’ visit while delaying visa arrangements, and was not satisfied with the use of the term “traceability investigation”, and finally held a press conference in the name of the “Joint Expert Group on New Coronavirus Traceability Research”.
Beijing uses WHO to whitewash Wuhan Virus Institute and continues to smear the U.S. military
Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the station that the WHO is a world-class panel of experts, and that he was positive about the pipeline of contacts they received in Wuhan this time. However, he also questioned the lack of credibility of the Chinese narrative after China cleared the Wuhan lab of any suspicion of leaking the virus and the Chinese official media continued to spread the conspiracy theory that the virus originated from the U.S. military lab.
Chinese officials have repeatedly claimed, in an effort to shake things off, that the origin of the virus did not necessarily originate in China. However, even Dr. Wenhong Zhang, head of the Shanghai New Coronary Pneumonia Clinical Treatment Team and head of the Infection Unit at Huashan Hospital of Fudan University, who has a high reputation among Chinese civilians, said in an interview with China Daily, the official Chinese English-language newspaper, that if the virus had been introduced into China from abroad, it would have developed in several cities in China at the same time, not in a chronological order.
The China Daily later retracted the story.
The AP investigative report had noted that Chinese officials had long ago issued a gag order prohibiting Chinese scientists from releasing reports or data investigating the origin of the virus without permission. Humans would have to be investigated to know what kind of animal was the intermediate host of the transmitted virus. What is certain, however, is that this tight control of scientific research by Chinese officials will not help humanity know sooner how the plague pandemic of the century actually occurred.
Gordon said the panel’s visit was made possible only a year after the outbreak, and he is pessimistic that “we will never unravel the real mystery of how the coronavirus originated and caused the global pandemic.”
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