The World Health Organization (WHO), in line with increasing evidence that the coronavirus pandemic likely had its start from a lab in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, would like to proceed with a second probe into the subject.
In fact, one WHO scientist from Denmark recently indicated that the lab leak origin was “probable.”
In the stunning reversal, Dr. Peter Ben Embarek, who initially dismissed the lab leak theory as “extremely unlikely,” said he now considers the possibility a “probable hypothesis,” according to the Washington Post, which cites a documentary airing on Danish television channel TV2.“An employee who was infected in the field by taking samples falls under one of the probable hypotheses,” Ben Embarek told the interviewers.“This is where the virus jumps directly from a bat to a human. In that case, it would then be a laboratory worker instead of a random villager or other person who has regular contact with bats,” he explained.
In the same interview, Embarek also admitted that China pressured independent scientific investigators to drop the hypothesis that the virus escaped from a laboratory.
“In the beginning, they didn’t want anything about the lab [in the report], because it was impossible, so there was no need to waste time on that,” Ben Embarek told documentarians, according to The Washington Post. “We insisted on including it because it was part of the whole issue about where the virus originated.”
Early Friday, China completely rejected WHO’s request for a renewed probe.
On Thursday the WHO urged China to share raw data from the earliest Covid-19 cases to revive its probe into the origins of the disease.China hit back, repeating its position that the initial investigation was enough and that calls for further data were motivated by politics instead of scientific inquiry.”We oppose political tracing … and abandoning the joint report” issued after the WHO expert team’s Wuhan visit in January, vice foreign minister Ma Zhaoxu told reporters. “We support scientific tracing.”
Later in the day, China reversed course.
China reversed course later on Friday and pledged to participate in COVID-19 origin tracing when Ma said “China’s stance on global origin tracing has been consistent and clear,” according to Chinese state media outlet Xinhua. Ma, however, continued the narrative that dismissing the conclusions of the first report would be disrespectful to global scientists.”Any attempt to overturn or distort the conclusions of the joint study report is political manipulation and disrespect for global scientists and science,” he said. “The label of ‘refusing origin tracing’ can never be pinned on China. Instead, it is very appropriate for the United States itself.”
Of course, Chinese officials are still trying smear the U.S..
Legal Insurrection readers may recall the timeline of events that possibly led to the pandemic from a House GOP report. In the analysis,the World Military Games was the original super-spreader event, and the athletes were exposed as the virus had been careening around Wuhan for 1-2 months at the time.
The Chinese assert that U.S. military athletes brought the virus with them.
As Beijing grapples with a worsening outbreak of the Delta variant, an outlandish conspiracy theory linking the origin of the coronavirus to the United States military has gained renewed traction in China….Zhao Lijian called for WHO to investigate both the Fort Detrick lab and a laboratory at the University of North Carolina, helmed by leading US coronavirus expert Ralph Baric.Zhao also suggested American military athletes who attended the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019 could have brought the coronavirus into China — reiterating a baseless claim he made on Twitter in March 2020.China’s state broadcaster CCTV, meanwhile, aired a 30-minute report this week titled the “dark inside story of Fort Detrick.
China’s chaotic, histrionic response to the renewed request for a probe is certainly suggestive that the cover-ups will continue for quite some time.
I think the real question is why Embarek and WHO are walking back their original take on the subject.
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