A team of scientists from the World Health Organization (WHO) is returning from their four-week stay in Wuhan, China, investigating the origins of COVID-19. Their work is already drawing attention.
After White House press secretary Jen Psaki said it would be good for American scientists to “independently” verify the findings, one of the team members, Dr. Peter Daszak, tweeted in part: I am disappointed that a statement came out that could undermine the veracity of this work even before the report is released. “
Criticism comes from all sides. “China has given them very controlled and limited access,” Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University told Fox News, “and received an inconclusive and supportive report. [China’s] narrative.”
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In turn, the WHO team called the probe “robust”. And they are, in fact, some of the preliminary “conclusions” that the team reached that are being noticed.
WHO scientists said in an outgoing statement that it is “very likely” that the coronavirus was initially transmitted by jumping from an animal to a human (perhaps starting with a bat, associated with the Wuhan seafood market) . This was widely believed.
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But they said there was a “possibility” that the virus reached Wuhan through frozen food. This is a narrative that Beijing has pressed to remove the blame for the origin of COVID-19 from the country.
In addition, it is a means of transmission that other scientists have minimized. A WHO scientist called the “cold chain” transmission “extremely rare”. Makary suggested it was “scientifically implausible”.
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With the suggestion that this option was a small possibility, however, Chinese state media classified the virus this week as “not geographically limited”.
The WHO team also appeared to end speculation that the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan. Not only did they call it “extremely unlikely”, they said it was not worth “further studies”.
A virus strain manufactured intentionally released in Wuhan is widely rejected. But some experts think that the accident hypothesis deserves a second analysis. “We need to do a proper investigation,” Makary told Fox News.
Chinese government newspapers seemed to jump over this acquittal of their laboratories at the source of the virus, demanding that United States laboratories should open their doors for inspection and possible foul play.
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Considering the delays and limitations of this investigation and the potential value of public relations for China, critics of the World Health Organization say the investigation should not even have been conducted.
“WHO shouldn’t have gone to China,” said Makary categorically.
But given the deadly scale and scope of this global pandemic, others may agree with WHO team leader Peter Emberek, when he said that while they had not made a dramatic change to the COVID-19 narrative, they “added details to that. story”.
WHO says more rigs are planned.