The World Health Organization (WHO) is now taking a different tone in calling upon China for full transparency to support a new investigation into the real origins of COVID.
Despite initially supporting Beijing's cooperation during the beginning of the pandemic and this year's probe into the COVID origins in Wuhan, the WHO is now urging China to reveal raw data and grant permission to retest laboratory samples they've collected from early cases of the coronavirus for a new investigation which China has long been opposed to.
"[It] reflects scientific solidarity at its best and is no different from what we encourage all countries, including China, to support so that we can advance the studies of the origins quickly and effectively," a statement from the WHO read, as reported by Newsweek. WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who despite expressing gratitude to China for allowing an investigation into Wuhan earlier this year, admitted that the group of 25 international scientists tasked for the investigation had "difficulties" in accessing raw data.
WHO said on Wednesday that it is currently working on studying samples from a "number of countries" that reported COVID samples in 2019, including Italy. It is hoping to prove or disprove the Wuhan lab leak, but it would be impossible to do so unless China provides access to all data to address that theory.
The Wuhan lab leak theory gained steam again this year, after U.S. intelligence pointed to evidence suggesting that the theory was indeed viable. According to the New York Post, WHO's Dr. Peter Ben Embarek, who earlier this year concluded in the first investigation that the Wuhan lab leak theory was "extremely unlikely," is now considering it to be a "probable hypothesis."
"An employee who was infected in the field by taking samples falls under one of the probable hypotheses," Dr. Embarek told interviewers in a documentary that aired on Danish television channel TV2. "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."
"So it is actually in the probable category," the Danish scientist concluded. Dr. Embarek said that when he joined a team to investigate in China whether a lab worker was indeed COVID patient zero, Chinese scientists and officials refused to share any data and urged them to dismiss the theory. He added that the WHO scientists were not allowed to see proper data and that the Wuhan lab leak theory was discussed two days before the team was set to conclude their visit in China.
Dr. Embarek said that the Chinese "didn't want anything about the lab [in the report], because it was impossible, so there was no need to waste time on that. We insisted on including it, because it was part of the whole issue about where the virus originated."
The WHO scientist commented, "It's probably because it means that there is a human error behind such an incident, and they are not very happy to admit it."
China continues to vehemently deny all allegations surrounding the Wuhan lab leak theory.
