The origin of the year-long coronavirus pandemic remains a mystery after scientists from the World Health Organization (WHO) completed their investigation in Wuhan, China – drawing criticism from American officials.
Peter Ben Embarek, who led the investigation for months with a team of WHO scientists, said on Wednesday that the investigation did not dramatically change the image of the virus. But he stepped on the theory that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory in China’s Hubei province.
DEPARTMENT OF STATE SAYS ‘JURY STILL’ ON THE INVESTIGATION OF WHO IS WUHAN CORONAVIRUS
Embarek said the theory is “extremely unlikely” and does not require further studies.
“I think the report is shameful,” Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told Fox News on Wednesday, rejecting the conclusion that the virus did not come from a laboratory. “WHO, instead of intervening like medical professionals, instead of acting quickly to stop this pandemic … just echoed the lies of the Chinese communist government.”
Cruz pointed to the arrests of whistleblowers and scientists by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in late 2019 as examples of his attempts to cover up the impending pandemic. He further claimed that WHO helped the Chinese government to hide the extent of its involvement in the coronavirus pandemic.
The Texas Republican maintains the belief that the virus was an accident by the Chinese government, as it started “400 meters” from one of Wuhan’s laboratories, which he said was studying a genetic sample of the coronavirus found in bats.
But the WHO team said they found no evidence that the new coronavirus was being studied in Wuhan’s laboratory before the outbreak.
The head of the COVID-19 panel at the National Health Commission of China, Dr. Liang Wannian, also pointed to evidence that suggests the virus was prevalent before the first reported case, for “several weeks”.
WHO TAKES INVESTIGATION ON IF THE COVID-19 VIRUS LEAVES FROM WUHAN LAB, CALLING THE INCOMPENSIVE THEORY
“This suggests that we cannot rule out that it was circulating in other regions and that circulation was not declared,” he said.
But WHO officials believe that the virus is unlikely to have been transmitted directly from bats to humans and that the virus has instead passed from species through intermediate hosts such as pangolins, ferrets, minks, snakes or turtles.
Embarek said the WHO team of researchers found frozen wild animals sold in the Wuhan market, coming from regions where bats and hosts are known to carry a virus similar to the new coronavirus.
“We know that the virus can survive in conditions found in these cold and frozen environments, but we don’t really understand whether the virus can be transmitted to humans,” said Embarek during the conference.
China defended the idea that the virus is being transmitted globally through frozen foods, claiming to have found traces of it in frozen shrimp from Saudi Arabia, beef from Brazil and pork from the United States – but experts have not proved that the humans can then be infected.
COVID-19 “did not start in Wuhan, in central China, but could come through imported frozen food and packaging: experts,” the CCP said in a November Facebook post, Reuters reported last year.
But US officials in the food and drug industry are saying “not so fast” and have rejected the suggestion that frozen food could be the carrier of COVID-19.
CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP
“There is no reliable evidence of food, food containers or food packaging being associated or a likely source of [COVID-19], “Frank Yiannas, FDA Deputy Commissioner for Food Policy and Response, said in a tweet on Tuesday.” This coronavirus in particular causes respiratory diseases and is transmitted from person to person, unlike gastrointestinal or gastrointestinal viruses of food origin, such as norovirus and hepatitis One, which often makes people sick because of contaminated food.
The WHO investigative team tried to control expectations and pointed out that it may take years for health experts to understand the origins of the coronavirus.