AP Report: Draft Of Joint Investigation By WHO And The CCP Says That COVID Did NOT Come From A Lab

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Isn’t it shocking how the preliminary results of the fact-finding mission are exactly what the Chinese Communist Party wanted?

It’s quite a coincidence.

On Monday, the Associated Press reported on a draft of the joint China-World Health Organization report on the origin of the novel coronavirus. Unsurprisingly, it states that the most likely origin of the virus is that it spread from bats through another species to humans and that a lab leak is “extremely unlikely.” It also proposed further research into every area except the lab leak hypothesis.

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 offer little new insight into how the virus first emerged and leave many questions unanswered, though that was as expected. But the report does provide more detail on the reasoning behind the researchers’ conclusions. The team proposed further research in every area except the lab leak hypothesis.

Source: Associated Press

This weekend, 60 Minutes investigated the investigation. The complete videos of the interviews by Lesley Stahl cannot be embedded here, but you can watch them on the CBS News website.

This past Friday, a long-anticipated — and much-debated — report by the World Health Organization was delayed again. It was supposed to be a kind of post mortem on a trip to China by a WHO-led team of international scientists which took place earlier this year.

The question: how did SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, originate? Among the leading theories examined: was it accidentally leaked from a lab in Wuhan or did it come from infected animals in a wet market there?

The WHO inquiry was far from comprehensive, because, as it has done since the beginning of the outbreak, the Chinese government withheld information.

Source: CBC News

Stahl interviewed a prominent member of the WHO investigation, Peter Daszak, who trusted the Chinese Communist Party at their word when they said that there were no irregularities at the Wuhan Lab. He didn’t seem to be concerned that there were deleted files, destroyed lab samples, and a whole lot of other questionable behavior by the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including not reporting cases of a “pneumonia-like illness” in the fall of 2019.

But Peter Daszak’s impartiality on this is questionable since he has championed gain-of-function research and had dismissed the lab origin theory prior to the trip to Wuhan, favoring instead the zoonotic theory of spread through the wet market despite no evidence connecting several early cases of COVID-19 to the wet market in Wuhan.

A former NSC official in the Clinton administration and member of a WHO advisory committee on genetic engineering, Jamie Metzl, has called for a full, independent inquiry of the origin of the novel coronavirus in an open letter that has been signed by more than two dozen international experts.

Metzel said that the WHO “investigation” wasn’t a real investigation per se, it was what he calls a “highly- chaperoned, highly-curated study tour.” He added, “Imagine if we have asked the Soviet Union to do a co-investigation of Chernobyl. It doesn’t really make sense.”

Metzl told Stahl that the evidence of a lab leak is circumstantial but compelling. He said, “We would have to ask the question, ‘Well, why in Wuhan?’ To quote Humphrey Bogart, ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, why Wuhan?’ What Wuhan does have is China’s level four virology institute, with probably the world’s largest collection of bat viruses, including bat coronaviruses.”

China ruled out a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology before a WHO-led team arrived in China to look into how and where the COVID-19 virus originated. The team found that the virus most likely spread from wildlife farms to a Wuhan wet market. https://t.co/HVr5RFCXs6 pic.twitter.com/Yhs47k8WrD

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 28, 2021

On Sunday’s Face The Nation, the same sentiment was reiterated by Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA Commissioner during the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019.

DR. GOTTLIEB: It looks like the WHO report was an attempt to try to support the China narrative, Chinese narrative around this- this origin of the vaccine. You know, the lab leak theory doesn’t seem like a plausible theory unless you aggregate the biggest collection of coronaviruses and put them in a lab, a minimum-security lab in the middle of a densely populated center and experiment on animals, which is exactly what the Wuhan Institute of Virology did. They were using these viruses in a BSL-2 lab and, we now know, infecting animals. So that creates the opportunity for a lab leak. It might not be the most likely scenario on how this virus got out, but it has to remain a scenario. And I think at the end of the day, we’re never going to fully discharge that possibility. What we’re going to have here is a battle of competing narratives. (Emphasis added)

“It looks like the @WHO report was an attempt to try to support the Chinese narrative…around the origin,” Former FDA Commissioner @ScottGottliebMD tells @margbrennan

He says a current “lab leak” theory doesn’t seem like the most likely case, but “it has to remain a scenario” pic.twitter.com/D0l1sIc9I5

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) March 28, 2021

Shorter Dr. Gottlieb: A lab leak is unlikely only if the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not doing all of the things they were doing.

When you put it like that…a lab leak does seem plausible, doesn’t it?

Also, on March 25, an environmental chemistry paper was published stating that there are several very compelling reasons to examine a lab leak theory.

There is a near-consensus view that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), the causative agent of COVID-19, has a natural zoonotic origin; however, several characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 taken together are not easily explained by a natural zoonotic origin hypothesis. These include a low rate of evolution in the early phase of transmission; the lack of evidence for recombination events; a high pre-existing binding to human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2); a novel furin cleavage site (FCS) insert; a flat ganglioside-binding domain (GBD) of the spike protein which conflicts with host evasion survival patterns exhibited by other coronaviruses; and high human and mouse peptide mimicry. Initial assumptions against a laboratory origin by contrast have remained unsubstantiated. Furthermore, over a year after the initial outbreak in Wuhan, there is still no clear evidence of zoonotic transfer from a bat or intermediate species. Given the immense social and economic impact of this pandemic, identifying the true origin of SARS-CoV-2 is fundamental to preventing future outbreaks. The search for SARS-CoV-2′s origin should include an open and unbiased inquiry into a possible laboratory origin.
Source: Springer Link

(Emphasis added)

But the WHO and the Chinese Communist Party are dismissing all of these concerns, and all of the experts that are calling for greater transparency into the investigation of the virus’s origin.

The Chinese Communist Government has been spreading disinformation from the beginning of the pandemic, suggesting that it was spread by the U.S. military in October 2019 at the military games in Wuhan, and insisted on the wet market theory while dismissing any suggestion that it came from the lab in Wuhan. Whistleblowers and reporters speaking out about what was happening in Wuhan went missing or died suddenly.

Millions of people all over the world have died from the virus, and many will die from “unintended consequences” like poverty, undiagnosed illness, drug overdoses, and suicide. There have also been financial, employment, and educational consequences as a result of the response to this pandemic.

We need to know the origin of the virus, and the CCP and their buddies in the WHO can’t just push aside legitimate concerns from medical experts around the globe.