The long-awaited World Health Organization report on the origin of the coronavirus rules out a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a draft copy.
But the report can’t be trusted because the investigation essentially was conducted by China, a WHO adviser told “60 Minutes” in a segment that aired Sunday.
CBS News veteran Lesley Stahl noted the WHO team spent only three hours at the lab. And while they were there, said Jamie Metzl, the investigators “didn’t demand access to the records and samples and key personnel.”
Stahl said that was because of the ground rules China set with the WHO, which “has never had the authority to make demands or enforce international protocols.”
Metzl noted that the U.N. agency agreed that China even had veto power over who was on the team.
“On top of that, the WHO agreed, that in most instances, China would do the primary investigation and then just share its findings with international experts,” Metzl said as Stahl shook her head in disbelief.
“So these international experts weren’t allowed to do their own primary investigation,” he said.
Stahl interjected.
“Wait. “You’re saying that China did the investigation and showed the results to the committee, and that was it?”
Metzl replied: “Pretty much that was it.”
“Whoa!” Stahl said.
“Not entirely, but pretty much that was it,” Metzl continued.
“Imagine if we had asked the Soviet Union to do a co-investigation of Chernobyl,” he said. “It doesn’t really make sense.”
Last summer (under President Trump) the entire Intelligence community made a rare statement saying the same thing. LAST SUMMER! @CBS and @60Minutes ignored this and the impact of the virus starting in China.
Instead, you called it racist. https://t.co/QgNgyJBGjw
— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) March 29, 2021
Ric Grennell, the former director of national intelligence under President Trump, commented that the U.S. intelligence community issued a rare joint statement last summer saying the same the thing Metzl told Stahl.
CBS and “60 Minutes” ignored the statement at the time, however, he said on Twitter.
“Instead you called it racist.”
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month the Chinese government controlled the WHO investigation, dictating the team members and what they were allowed to see. The WHO also is allowing Chinese officials to review the final report and make changes.
According to a draft copy of the WHO report obtained by the Associated Press, the investigators concluded the most likely origin of the coronavirus is a transmission from bats to humans through another animal.
The report, the AP said Monday, finds that a lab leak is “extremely unlikely.”
However, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says declassified U.S. intelligence indicates the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And last week, former CDC Director Robert Redfield said in an interview with CNN he believes the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab.
Asked to respond to Redfield’s remarks, White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci noted at a virtual White House press briefing Friday that Redfield mentioned he was expressing his personal opinion. Fauci said “most public health officials” think the novel coronavirus didn’t come from a lab. Instead, he said, the conventional wisdom is that it adapted to humans naturally, spreading in “the community” in Wuhan for weeks before it was identified.
But Redfield argued that typically when a virus jumps from animals to humans, “it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient in human-to-human transmission.”
“It’s only an opinion; I’m allowed to have opinions now,” he said.
Redfield noted it’s “not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect the laboratory worker.”
“That’s not implying any intentionality,” Redfield said.
“It’s my opinion, right? But I am a virologist. I have spent my life in virology.”
Redfield said he does not believe “this somehow came from a bat to a human and at that moment in time, that the virus came to the human, became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human-to-human transmission.”
See Redfield’s CNN interview:
See Dr. Anthony Fauci’s remarks Friday:
Fauci’s controversial research at Wuhan lab
Newsweek reported in April 2020 that Fauci, over the previous decade, promoted the funding of a highly controversial type of research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Called “gain of function” research. It centers on manipulating viruses to explore their potential for infecting humans so that treatments can be developed in advance.
In the early days of the outbreak, the Chinese government blocked investigators from the U.S. and other nations, and it continues the cover-up, Pompeo contends.
In fact, in January 2021, China blocked the arrival of the WHO team investigating the origins of the pandemic, claiming that their visas had not yet been approved. The Guardian of London noted China blocked the team even though it “was not intending to probe claims that the virus originated in a Chinese lab.”
Pompeo told the Washington Examiner it is “absolutely imperative when this report comes out we understand the basis for the data, because I fear that in the end, this report will not be remotely reflective of what actually transpired.”
Pompeo said he doesn’t believe the investigators “had either the capacity or the access necessary to actually conduct a thorough investigation of how this Wuhan virus ultimately commenced.”
A member of the WHO investigative team, British zoologist Dr. Peter Daszak, appears as an author on at least 25 studies affiliated with a funding entity or author linked to a Chinese Communist Party think tank, university or government ministry, the National Pulse reported Thursday.
Congressional reports have blamed duplicity by the Chinese government and incompetence by the World Health Organization for the outbreak turing into a pandemic.
Under the Trump administration in mid-January, the Pompeo-led State Department issued a fact sheet contending Wuhan lab researchers “conducted experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar).”
Based on information from the intelligence community, the State Department said the lab “has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses.”
And the lab “has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military.”
When the head of the WHO investigation, Peter Ben Embarek, issued a preliminary determination in February, Metzel, the WHO adviser, said that the investigation by his agency actually was conducted by Chinese officials and was very short.
“And so, the WHO investigators were basically receiving reports from the Chinese officials,” Metzl told the Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham.
All the facts point to Wuhan lab
Pompeo told the Examiner it’s “absolutely critical that we get access to the people who conducted the investigation and ask them a series of questions.”
“Tell me what limits were placed on who could be selected. Tell me how the individuals were chosen,” Pompeo said. “Were there conflicts checks that were run?”
He also wants to know if there was anything in particular that the Chinese Communist Party didn’t want the investigators to review. Did they get access to the scientists who were in the laboratory in 2019 and the early part of 2020, and were they in a position to allow them to speak freely?
Pompeo said it’s also important to find out if the investigators got access to original data rather than “second-order information.”
The fact sheet said the U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the Wuhan lab became sick in autumn 2019 with symptoms consistent with COVID-19, before the first identified case of the outbreak.
The State Department said “that raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.”
Pompeo said “every fact that I have seen would be consistent with a release from” the Wuhan lab.
“You’ll remember, if you go back to the beginning, people were throwing around language that said, ‘Well, this had to have been natural, it couldn’t have been manmade’ — it’s not really the right way to think about this problem set,” he told the Examiner.
He said there are three facts that support the lab-leak theory: “the fact that it is possible they were working on a virus similar to the one that we now are suffering from, second, that inadequate biosafety measures at the facility, and then third, the massive, intentional cover-up coming from the most senior levels of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Pompeo said he hopes the report will provide answers, but he’s “skeptical that the Chinese Communist Party will ever permit anyone to really understand what happened there.
“I think that suggests that the alternative hypotheses about wet markets and the like are much less likely than the world originally believed,” he said.
Pompeo criticize the Biden administration’s decision to rejoin the WHO.
“At the point of maximum impact, the moment that the WHO’s pandemic prevention efforts were most critical, that they had to be the most right as quickly as they could, they allowed the Chinese Communist Party to walk all over them and denied the world the access to the information that it needed in a timely fashion that could well have saved lives all across the world,” he said. “And for that, the leadership at the WHO has to be held accountable.”
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
SUPPORT TRUTHFUL JOURNALISM. MAKE A DONATION TO THE NONPROFIT WND NEWS CENTER. THANK YOU!
This article was originally published by the WND News Center.