China has pressured experts not to investigate the COVID-19 leak from the Wuhan laboratory: what is it hiding?

When a joint World Health Organization mission with China released its findings on the origins of the pandemic earlier this year, the report said an accidental laboratory incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was “extremely unlikely”. Although the lab has conducted experiments on the bat coronavirus, Peter Embarek, WHO team leader, told a press conference on Feb. 9 that it was “highly unlikely that anything could escape from such a location.” Since then, China has insisted the WHO report was the last word, rejected requests for further investigation into a lab leak, and instead highlighted the origin of the virus outside of China. .

But now Embarek revealed how China pressured investigators. In una entrevista con la cadena danesa TV2, dijo que los representantes chinos se opusieron, hasta los últimos días de la misión, a cualquier mención de una posible fuga de laboratorio, alegando que “era imposible, y por tanto no había que perder el tiempo with him. “When Embarek insisted that something had to be included, he recalls, the Chinese only agreed to say it was” extremely unlikely. “

Embarek said he still believed a lab leak was “unlikely,” but the possibility was not strictly a zoonotic or accidental spill from the lab. He said a Wuhan lab worker could have been “patient zero” infected with a wild bat while collecting samples, a scenario that straddles the two assumptions. “An employee who got infected in the field while taking samples falls into one of the probable hypotheses, ”he said. “In this case, the virus passes directly from a bat to a human. In this case, it would be a lab worker rather than a random villager or someone else who has regular contact with bats. So it’s in the probable category. “ It was previously reported that the Wuhan lab collected bat samples in southern China.

Embarek also suggested further investigation into the relocation of the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention on December 2, 2019 to a location near a market where traces of the virus were later found. “You also have to move the virus collection, sampling and other collections from one place to another,” he said. The final report from the WHO and China said there had been no interruption in the movement.

Why has China been so resistant to the laboratory leak hypothesis? “Probably because it means there is human error behind such an incident, and they’re not very happy to admit it,” Embarek said. “Part of it is the traditional Asian feeling that you shouldn’t look bad, and the whole system is also very much about you being foolproof and everything has to be perfect. It could also be that someone wants to hide something. Who knows?”.

This is exactly the point. We must find the origins of the worst public health disaster in a century. A full, credible and science-based investigation must examine both the zoonotic spread and the possibility of a laboratory incident that China is now hiding. What is China hiding?

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