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Editor’s note: Here’s an excerpt from an article in The BMJ. To read the piece in its entirety, click here.
A World Health Organization (WHO) mission to study the COVID pandemic’s origins in China, which announced in February that the possibility that the virus had escaped from a laboratory needed no further investigation, was put under pressure by Chinese scientists who made up half the team to reach that conclusion, the scientist who led the mission has said.
Peter Ben Embarek, who led the scientists dispatched by WHO to Wuhan, told a Danish television documentary, broadcast on Aug. 12, that the Chinese scientists refused to even discuss the lab leak scenario unless the final report dismissed any need for further investigation.
Having haggled about it until 48 hours before they left China, Ben Embarek said, his Chinese counterpart eventually agreed to discuss the lab leak theory in the report “on the condition we didn’t recommend any specific studies to further that hypothesis.”
Discussing the team’s findings before leaving China, Ben Embarek told reporters that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely.” Asked by Denmark’s TV2 if that wording was a Chinese requirement, he said, “It was the category we chose to put it in at the end, yes.” This did not mean it was not impossible, he added.
Read the entire The BMJ article here.
