World health Organization Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus said Feb. 11 that all theories about the origin of Chinese communist pneumonia (COVID-19), including the hypothesis of a laboratory leak, merit further investigation. Ian Birrell, a reporter for the British news site UnHerd, said Tandse’s statement amounted to an “abrupt reversal” of the “lab leak theory” that his own organization had dismissed two days earlier.
Tandezai’s statement came two days after a news conference by a joint WHO-China panel investigating the origins of the outbreak in Wuhan said the lab leak theory was “highly improbable” and did not merit further exploration, the Daily Caller reported Feb. 11. Instead, the group recommended further research into theories favored by China, such as that the virus could have been imported into Wuhan from other countries.
Some questions have been raised about whether some of the hypotheses have been discarded,” Tandse said. I want to clarify that all hypotheses are still open for further research.”
The WHO team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan has not yet issued a report explaining why they believe it is highly unlikely that the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research, which was studying bat-type coronaviruses prior to the pandemic, would have conducted further investigations.
Deadly viruses have a history of escaping from Chinese laboratories. in 2004, the first SARS virus escaped twice from the Chinese Institute of Virus Research in Beijing.
The WHO investigation into the origin of COVID-19 was conducted on the ground in China about a year after the first case was reported in Wuhan. The team’s investigation in China has been kept under wraps, CNBC reported.
WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told The Daily Caller that the WHO report is expected to be released “within the next few days.
Members of the scientific community and the Biden administration have criticized the WHO panel’s conclusions, which say that no more resources should be devoted to investigating the laboratory leak theory.
Richard H. Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told The Daily Caller, “The WHO delegation is a sham. It has no credibility. Its members were willing – and, in at least one case, enthusiastic – to participate in the dissemination of disinformation.”
State Department spokesman Ned Price said on Sept. 9 that the Biden Administration would not make any conclusions about the WHO panel’s investigation until they release a full report.
Dr. Peter Daszak, the only U.S. member of the WHO panel, said he was “disappointed” by Price’s comments and tweeted that U.S. intelligence on the origins of COVID-19 should not be trusted and that the White House should have fully trusted their (WHO) report before reviewing it. trusting the conclusions of the WHO panel of inquiry.
Datsyak has also come under fire for joining the WHO panel. He worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research and its top bat-type coronavirus researcher, Zhengli Shi, even before the outbreak.
In a podcast interview a few weeks before the first known case of COVID-19 was reported in Wuhan, Dazak discussed how easy it was to edit the bat coronavirus in the lab. Proponents of such experiments, also known as gain-of-function research, say it’s a useful tool for creating treatments for future outbreaks, but some virologists say it’s too dangerous because it poses the risk of introducing new viruses into humans.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Datsak is president of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which sent nearly $600,000 in U.S. taxpayer-funded grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research between 2014 and 2019 to study as part of a research project to study bat coronaviruses in China.
Shi Zhengli, known in China as “Batwoman,” told Scientific American last March that she lost sleep after she first learned of the outbreak in December 2019, fearing the virus had leaked from her lab in Wuhan.
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