The Daily Mail reports that the Director-General of the World Health Organization privately believes the covid pandemic started following a leak from a Chinese laboratory.
While publicly the group maintains that ‘all hypotheses remain on the table’ about the origins of Covid, the source said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), had recently confided to a senior European politician that the most likely explanation was a catastrophic accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, where infections first spread during late 2019…..The WHO was initially criticised for its deferential approach to China over the pandemic, as well as a willingness to accept Beijing’s protestations that claims of a laboratory leak were just a ‘conspiracy theory’.However, in the absence of any compelling evidence of ‘zoonotic’ spread – the process by which a virus leaps from animals to humans – it is now adopting a more neutral public stance.Dr Tedros updated member states on the pandemic this month, admitting: ‘We do not yet have the answers as to where it came from or how it entered the human population.‘Understanding the origins of the virus is very important scientifically to prevent future epidemics and pandemics.’
I have underscored that the lab leak possibility was not only possible but probable since February of 2020. A glimpse of the timeline created by a Republican congressional panel trying to piece together the sequence of events underscores that a serious assessment of the covid pandemic must include an evaluation of the experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Meanwhile, China complained, again, about the recent COVID report published by the WHO’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO). Chinese officials deemed the Wuhan lab-leak scenario a political lie…and blamed the US for the disease.
SAGO said there has been no new data to support the lab leak theory, but that it “remains important to consider all reasonable scientific data that is available … to evaluate the possibility of the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the human population through a laboratory incident.”…In response to the report, the Xinhua article pointed to the WHO’s inconclusive 2021 origins report that referred to a lab leak scenario as “extremely unlikely,” and the article also pushed a theory that COVID could actually have originated in the U.S.It said the U.S. had been a “terrible bookkeeper” of its own early COVID outbreak and claimed that the Fort Detrick base in Maryland and biolabs at the University of North Carolina “have long been engaged in coronavirus research and modification.”
At the same time, China defended its inane “zero-COVID” policy after the US ambassador said it was causing serious damage to the global economy.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said the Chinese economy is recovering from the effects of the pandemic and “facts prove” the policy mandating lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing is “suitable for China’s national conditions and has stood the test of history.”“We have full confidence that (we can) contain the epidemic, steady the economy and achieve the goal of safe economic development,” Wang said at a daily briefing.China has sought to completely eliminate outbreaks of COVID-19 with tough restrictions, while most other countries are relaxing their anti-coronavirus measures to “live with” the disease.Ambassador Nicholas Burns said on Thursday that the “zero-COVID” policy has “had a major impact” on business sentiment, singling out as especially damaging a two-month lockdown in Shanghai, China’s largest city and key financial hub.
Neither complaining about realities nor ignoring them seems to work well for China. The trouble is China’s poor choices no longer just impact China.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY