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A senior Atlantic Council researcher called for a substantial international investigation into the origins of the coronavirus and said the World Health Organization investigation was woefully inadequate.
Jamie Metzl, who once served on the National Security Council under the Clinton administration, told CBS “60 Minutes” that the WHO investigation in Wuhan should in fact be called a “highly supervised study tour and highly organized “.
“Everyone in the world imagines that this is some kind of full investigation,” he said. “It doesn’t. This panel of experts saw only what the Chinese government wanted them to see.”
Joint WHO-China study on origins of COVID-19 said transmission of the virus from bats to humans by another animal is the most likely scenario, according to a draft copy obtained by The Associated Press.
Last month, Peter Daszak, a member of the WHO expert team sent to Wuhan to investigate the origins of the pandemic, said China had granted the team full access to all sites, a claim that was immediately greeted with skepticism.
There have been several theories as to what led to Patient Zero. The most widely accepted is that there has been interspecific transmission between animal and human in a wet market in Wuhan. Other theories, which are often seen as marginalized in the media, include the possibility that the virus somehow escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology or that COVID-19 is some kind of Frankenstein’s Intentionally Released Biological Weapon.
Daszak told “60 Minutes” that the organization’s theory is that the virus was transmitted by bats on a wildlife farm.
“And then the animals were shipped to the market,” he said. “And they contaminated people while they were handling them, chopping them, killing them, whatever you did before you cooked an animal.”
He called the theory that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely.”
Dr Robert Redfield, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview last week – without providing any evidence – that he believed the virus had escaped from the lab.
“I’m allowed to have opinions now. I’m from the point of view, I still think the most likely ideology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a lab, blurted out. Other people don’t believe it. That’s good, ”Redfield told CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta. “Science will eventually figure it out. It is not uncommon for respiratory pathogens being worked on in a lab to infect the lab worker.”
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Metzl has joined more than two dozen experts demanding a new international investigation into the origins of the virus.
“We should ask ourselves the question:” Well, why in Wuhan? To quote Humphrey Bogart, “Of all the gin joints in all the cities of the world, why Wuhan? “What Wuhan has is China’s level four virology institute, with probably the world’s largest collection of bat viruses, including bat coronaviruses,” he said. .
He described the WHO investigation as China essentially collecting its own data and then handing it over to the team. He likened it to calling on the Soviet Union to “do a Chernobyl co-investigation.”
Former President Trump was one of the main critics of the WHO and of what he saw as a warm relationship with Beijing. In May, Trump announced that the United States would end its relationship with the health agency over its handling of the coronavirus. The United States had been the agency’s largest contributor to the tune of about $ 450 million per year. China, on the other hand, pays around $ 50 million a year – although Beijing recently announced a $ 2 billion cash injection.
(President Biden announced in January that the United States would join the WHO)
CNN asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday whether the United States would take punitive action against Beijing in the wake of the outbreak.
“The problem for us is making sure we’re doing everything we can to prevent another pandemic even as we work on this one,” Blinken said. “Or at the very least, to make sure that we can much more effectively mitigate any damage done if something happens in the future.”
China has asked the WHO to investigate other countries to see if the virus could have spread to Wuhan.
The New York Post pointed out that during his confirmation hearing, Blinken admitted that China “had misled the world.” He even seemed to cast doubt on the next WHO report on the origins of the virus.
“We have real concerns about the methodology and process that followed this report, including that the Beijing government apparently helped write it,” Blinken said. “But let’s see what comes out of this report.”
Dr Anthony Fauci weighed in on the debate surrounding the origins of COVID-19 on Sunday, saying he believed he had adapted “in nature.”
“It’s entirely conceivable that it will spread considerably for weeks, if not months, before we recognize it at the end of December, giving it enough time to adjust to a human,” Fauci told CBS’s “Face the Nation”. “The other theory that people have is that somehow he did this in a lab and he accidentally escaped.”
“I mean, these are just different opinions,” he added. “I think most likely that in nature, in nature, it has adapted.”
Fox News’ Peter Aiken and The Associated Press contributed to this report
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