According to a senior Government source, the Director of the World Health Organization believes the Covid epidemic began as a result of a leak from a Chinese laboratory.
While the World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently revealed in a senior European legislator that the most plausible explanation for Covid’s origins was a terrible accident at a facility in Wuhan, where infections first spread in late 2019.
In April 2020, The Mail on Sunday first reported on Western intelligence agencies’ fears about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists were manipulating coronaviruses taken from bats in caves over 1,000 miles away – the same caves where Covid-19 is likely to have originated. The mortality toll from the Covid epidemic is currently believed to be over 18 million people worldwide.
The WHO was initially criticised for its deferential approach to China over the pandemic, as well as a willingness to accept Beijing’s protestations that claims of a laboratory leak were just a ‘conspiracy theory’.
However, in the absence of any compelling evidence of ‘zoonotic’ spread – the process by which a virus leaps from animals to humans – it is now adopting a more neutral public stance.
Dr Tedros updated member states on the pandemic this month, admitting: ‘We do not yet have the answers as to where it came from or how it entered the human population.
‘Understanding the origins of the virus is very important scientifically to prevent future epidemics and pandemics.
‘But morally, we also owe it to all those who have suffered and died and their families. The longer it takes, the harder it becomes. We need to speed up and act with a sense of urgency.
‘All hypotheses must remain on the table until we have evidence that enables us to rule certain hypotheses in or out. This makes it all the more urgent that this scientific work be kept separate from politics. The way to prevent politicisation is for countries to share data and samples with transparency and without interference from any government. The only way this scientific work can progress successfully is with full collaboration from all countries, including China, where the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 were reported.’
The WHO formed the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (Sago) last year to outline which studies would be required to determine the origins of SARS-CoV-2, as Covid is scientifically known, and to “create a global framework for studying the origins of emerging and re-emerging pathogens.”
The WHO’s initial investigation into the outbreak was aggressively contested by China, leading to a study concluding that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was most likely transmitted to humans by a bat via another unidentified species.
Dr Tedros accepted the report’s shortcomings and ordered the new process after 14 countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, criticized its findings as significantly tainted.
The government has been hesitant in assigning blame for Covid, which China-skeptics attribute to a desire not to offend Beijing.
American intelligence, on the other hand, has put the clandestine Wuhan laboratory at the center of their investigation.