In early 2021, almost a year after the coronavirus pandemic began, a joint mission of the World Health Organization with China, he made a report in which they indicated that it was “extremely unlikely” that the origin of the disease was an accidental laboratory event at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But nevertheless, An expert from the international organization now gave details of the work he did and raised doubts.
The head of the WHO team, Peter Embarek, indicated in a press conference on February 9 that, despite the fact that the aforementioned laboratory had conducted experiments with bat coronavirus, it was “highly unlikely that anything could escape from such a place.”
Faced with this conclusion, China assured that this report was the one that had the last word and did not want to be investigated thoroughly any possible leak at the site. In fact, they pointed out that the origin of the disease could even have occurred outside of that country.
However, six months after releasing the report, Embarek gave details on how China put pressure on the WHO researchers. In an interview with the Danish network TV2 said that the representatives of that country opposed – until the last days of the mission – any mention of a possible laboratory leak, alleging that “It was impossible, and therefore there was no need to waste time with it”.
Given this position, the expert insisted that something had to be included in the report on the matter, but that they only they replied that it was “extremely unlikely”.
Although Embarek made it clear that, in his opinion, that a leak occurred in the laboratory is “unlikely”, he mentioned the hypothesis that a local employee could have been “patient zero”, by becoming infected with a wild bat while collecting samples.
In that sense, he explained: “In that case, the virus jumped directly from a bat to a human, so it would be a laboratory worker rather than a random villager or another person who has regular contact with bats. So is in the category of probable”.
In this way, he made reference to one of the versions about the origin of COVID-19 that argued that a Chinese worker from somewhere far from the city could have been the so-called “zero patient.”
The specialist suggested that an in-depth investigation be carried out about the transfer of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Wuhan on December 2, 2019 to a place near a market where viral traces were later detected.
“You also have to move virus collection, sampling and other collections from one place to another,” he said. On this point, both the WHO report and China agreed that there were no interruptions in the transfer.
When the expert was asked why he believed that China resists the theory of a possible leak from the laboratory as the origin of the pandemic, he replied: “Probably because it means that there is human error behind such an incident, and they are not very happy about it. admit it”.
Finally, he argued: “In part there is the traditional Asian feeling that you should not look bad, and also the whole system is very focused on that one is infallible and that everything must be perfect. It may also be that someone wants to hide something. Who knows?”.
