N. Peter Kramer’s Weekly Column
Research by the WHO into the origin of the coronavirus was supposed to stop speculation. But in the ‘best tradition’ of the WHO, the results of the mission seem to be unreliable. The team leader contradicts himself on crucial points.
The task of the World Health Organisation mission to Wuhan was to shed light on the very beginning of the pandemic. On February 9, the results were presented to the press in China. Those findings seem less and less solid. Especially since the head of the mission, Danish scientist Peter Embarek, discussed them in a very different way in a webinar of the Singaporean Medical University on February 26. There he gave a completely different explanation among colleague-scientists than at the press conference.
At the time, it officially sounded that the team had ‘access to a great deal of retrospective data’. ‘Of course you always want more data than you have’, Embarek said in Singapore. ‘The studies we looked at with our Chinese colleagues were all rather recent. There is still a need for more in-depth research into datasets’. Equally flagrant was the explanation of a possible leak of the virus from a laboratory via a sick employee. ‘A very unlikely hypothesis’, Embarek said at the press conference. But among colleagues in Singapore he said: ‘The hypothesis about a lab accident is not off the table. It was not a high priority for our research. This can be reviewed depending on new data’. Replies to journalists suggested that history and monitoring mechanisms of those labs had been examined. In the Singapore Embarek said when ‘we didn’t audit all labs, we don’t have hard facts or detailed data on which viruses they examined’.
The Wuhan WHO mission has always been the subject of doubt. The US criticised the mission. Professor Marion Koopmans, Embarek’ s right hand on the Wuhan mission, hit back on twitter, ‘no patience to wait for our interim report?’. Yet, that report will not be published. The world has to wait until March 15 for a final and verifiable text.
It is clear that the WHO mission fell in the hands of China’s Communist Party. The obscuring communication puts the WHO and its Chairman Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, an accomplice of the Chinese regime, once more in a difficult position. But no worries for them, US President Biden and the EU in his slipstream, expressed recently their unconditional confidence in the WHO!
