WHO report: *Of course* the Wuhan virus didn't start in one of China's laboratories

Nearly two full months after the World Health Organization sent a team to China to investigate the origins of the novel coronavirus, they are finally close to releasing their findings. An early copy of the draft report was leaked to the press by an anonymous diplomat from a WHO member country and the overview portion doesn’t inspire much confidence. Rather than being able to pin down the precise origin of the first strain of the virus, the report offers multiple scenarios (all of which we’ve heard before) with varying degrees of “likelihood” for each. But the one thing the WHO team seems to be very confident in is that there’s almost no chance that the virus could have leaked out of one of the two advanced viral research laboratories in Wuhan. Perish the thought. (Associated Press, emphasis added)

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A joint WHO-China study on the origins of COVID-19 says that transmission of the virus from bats to humans through another animal is the most likely scenario and that a lab leak is “extremely unlikely,” according to a draft copy obtained by The Associated Press.

The findings were largely as expected and left many questions unanswered. The team proposed further research in every area except the lab leak hypothesis.

The report’s release has been repeatedly delayed, raising questions about whether the Chinese side was trying to skew the conclusions to prevent blame for the pandemic falling on China. A World Health Organization official said late last week that he expected it would be ready for release “in the next few days.”

The highlighted sections in the excerpt above convey a message that could have come straight from the desk of any Chinese Communist Party official. The WHO is saying that they still don’t know where the virus originated, but they’ve somehow concluded that it’s extremely unlikely that it came from either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control. In order to get to the bottom of this, the WHO concludes that further research is required into all possible avenues… except the lab leak hypothesis. Because, you know… why on Earth would anyone want to go poking around into an idea like that.

Let’s recall that when the WHO was finally allowed to send a team to China to investigate (after being stonewalled for months) the trip was barely two weeks long. The members of the investigative team were kept under constant surveillance by the Chinese and conflicting reports at the time made it unclear how much access the researchers were given to the laboratories or indeed if they were allowed inside the doors at all.

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From the beginning, the CCP has tried to blame everyone and everything else in the world for the original launch of the virus. They’ve locked up both doctors and journalists who dared to even discuss the possibility that COVID came out of one of their labs. And the WHO (a subsidiary of the United Nations) has a long history of being very deferential to the Chinese Communist Party.

Let’s not forget that a wide range of experts from nations not named “China” haven’t found any reason to rule out the laboratory origin theory. Both the Trump administration and Joe Biden’s team have agreed that a fact sheet developed over the winter is accurate and it definitely allows for the lab origin theory. It doesn’t prove that’s how this whole mess started (because it’s hard to prove something you’re not allowed to fully investigate) but they definitely couldn’t rule it out. On top of that, we should also keep in mind that scientists have yet to discover an exact match for the earliest samples of the virus in either bats or pangolins. They both have coronaviruses that are similar, but that’s far from a smoking gun in support of the animal jump theory.

And not for nothing, but we’re talking about China here. They have a proven track record of experimenting with biological weaponry. The proposal that we should completely dismiss the idea that they were cooking up something in one of those laboratories that managed to slip out the back door is laughable. It’s obviously not an established fact at this point, but this report from the WHO looks a lot more like propaganda approved by the CCP than any sort of scientific investigation.

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David Strom 8:00 AM | December 24, 2024
Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | December 23, 2024
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