Other members of the World health Organization panel of experts arrive at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research on Feb. 3, 2021.
The White House said Monday (March 29) that several U.S. experts will conduct an extensive review of the WHO report on the source of the Chinese Communist virus (New Coronavirus), focusing on confirming whether the investigation is independent and technically sound.
“We’ve been very clear that our focus is on whether the investigation (is) independent, whether it (is) technically sound, and once that review is complete, we’ll have an assessment of the next steps.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told the media.
Several U.S. media outlets reported Monday that a joint report by the World Health Organization and China investigating the origin of the Chinese Communist virus concluded that the virus could have been passed from bats to humans through an intermediary animal and that a laboratory leak was “highly unlikely.
But the Associated Press said the investigation found that the Communist regime “imposed restrictions on outbreak research and ordered scientists not to talk to journalists” during the WHO team’s investigation.
The release of the joint report has been delayed again and again, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday (28) that he was concerned about China’s involvement in writing the report.
Blinken, who is visiting Brussels, Belgium, told CNN: “We have real concerns about the methodology and the process of this report. For example, the authorities in Beijing apparently helped write this report.”
Blinken did not answer the question of whether he would continue to “punish China [the Communist Party]” in the interview. But he said China has an obligation to fulfill its due diligence.
Blinken said there is concern about the report and the need for accountability for past issues related to the outbreak, but he stressed that the focus should be on how to build a strong international system to avoid a recurrence of similar outbreaks and reduce the damage from possible future crises.
Communist Party officials on Friday (26) have informed foreign diplomats in China of the results of a study on the traceability of the virus, a move that was seen as an attempt to set the tone for the WHO’s findings by announcing its conclusions ahead of the WHO.
Chinese officials said experts investigated four possible channels of virus transmission to Wuhan: direct transmission from bats carrying the virus to humans; transmission from bats to some intermediate host and then to humans; transmission of the virus through cold-chain Food; and leakage of the virus from a Wuhan laboratory due to a related accident.
They concluded that the hypothesis that the virus was transmitted via animal transmission and cold-chain food transmission was the most likely. And a laboratory leak was the least likely.
Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under former President Donald Trump (Trump), told CNN March 26 that he believes the virus was made at a Wuhan lab and then leaked, but that the leak was not necessarily intentional.
As a virologist, he also explained why he thinks the idea that the virus was passed from animals to humans doesn’t make sense. This is because the current outbreak has been localized in Wuhan since September 2019 or October 2019, several months before the official Communist Party timeline.
Trump-era Health Secretary Alex Azar, who appeared at a Heritage Foundation online seminar in January, said he had been instructing Redfield throughout January last year to contact Gao Fu, director of the Chinese (Communist Party) CDC, who told Redfield personally that the virus originated from animals on the Wuhan market.
And Redfield had been proposing that the U.S. CDC be willing to provide a team to assist in the investigation of the source of the virus. But it was not until Jan. 29 of last year that the U.S. offer was formally confirmed by the Chinese side, which has been pressing the Chinese (Communist Party) government to send isolates of the virus from Chinese patients, and even now, a year later, the Chinese side still has not provided any isolates of the first-generation virus.
“Reports from the Chinese Communist Party indicate that the virus was probably there before November, and the Chinese (Communist) government’s explanation for the outbreak doesn’t make sense.” Azhar said.
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