- The report recommended “further investigations” into the idea this could have happened in a laboratory, as well as “all other” possible routes.
- NBC News tried to contact the information office of China’s National Health Commission for comment Friday but was told the officials covering the issue had left for the day.
- Now, the WHO is asking the same questions.
The latest study marks a U-turn for the agency, which was chastised last year for dismissing the hypothesis and was accused of being too obedient to Beijing as reported by NBC.
Investigation
The World Health Organization is recommending more investigation into the theory that Covid-19 leaked from a Chinese laboratory, something once dismissed by some as a conspiracy theory but has since been taken seriously by some experts and officials.
“We always supported and participated in science-based global virus tracing, but we firmly opposed any forms of political manipulation.”
NBC News has contacted the Department of Defense and the University of North Carolina for a response.
The WHO’s change of direction came Thursday in the first report by its Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens, known as SAGO.
The group agreed that the now-infamous Wuhan seafood market likely “played an important role” early in the pandemic because a number of patients in December 2019 had links to that site.
Gaps in our knowledge
However, there are still “gaps in our knowledge,” it said, specifically about how the virus got to the market and where the first “spillover” between animals and humans happened.
China has previously suggested that Covid could have been imported into its country in frozen food.
Thursday’s WHO report said the “cold chain” theory should be investigated further, too.
A lab leak was once seen as a fringe conspiracy theory, clouded by the mistaken belief that its supporters were suggesting that Covid had been intentionally released as a bioweapon.
Last year, President Joe Biden told U.S. spy agencies to compile a report looking into Covid’s possible origins.
However, three members of the group did not agree that the lab leak theory should be investigated, including China’s Professor Yun-Gui Yang and Russia’s Dr Vladimir Dedkov, the report said.
Lab leak
Thursday’s report marks a dramatic shift for the WHO, which said in a February 2021 report that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely.”
In the early months of the Covid pandemic, Tedros was accused of being too eager to please Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In 2020, just as then-President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would sever its relationship with WHO completely, China upped its funding of the organization by $30 million.
In addition, China was slow to release data and alert the world about the true extent and potential danger of the rapidly spreading virus.
Jamie Metzl, who sits on a WHO advisory group unrelated to SAGO, told the AP that “the Chinese government is still refusing to share essential raw data and will not allow the necessary, full audit of the Wuhan labs.”
“Now, the WHO is asking the same questions.”
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Source: NBC
