March 22, 2021
Did covid-19 escape from a Wuhan lab? The WHO report can’t be the final word.
The World Health Organization’s final report on its investigation into covid-19’s origin is due any day now. But a major revelation has already emerged: This month, two members of the WHO investigative team acknowledged that lab workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China were sick — from what, it is not yet clear — in fall 2019, before the public coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.
That information confirms an assertion in a Jan. 15 statement by the State Department (where I worked at the time), and it represents the sort of fact pattern that investigators would expect if covid originated with an accidental lab leak, one of several possible but unproven theories.
No government, no public health official, no one affected by covid should accept such unserious explanations.
So will the final WHO report focus on the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Don’t count on it. Because the same WHO investigators who — responding to media inquiries — confirmed the existence of the sick lab workers immediately played down the importance of the information.
Read the full article from The Washington Post.
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