Covid-19: a WHO expert defends the investigation carried out in China

The WHO experts on a mission in Wuhan (China) to investigate the origins of the coronavirus on Wednesday questioned the reliability of US intelligence on the pandemic, after criticism from Washington.

“Do not rely too much on US intelligence” which is “frankly wrong in many aspects,” tweeted Peter Daszak on the last day of his stay in the Asian country. The expert was reacting to statements by the spokesperson for the US State Department, who seemed to distance himself the day before from the first conclusions of experts from the World Health Organization (WHO).

After a four-week mission in Wuhan, a time epicenter of the epidemic, the foreign specialists of this delegation indicated on Tuesday that they were unable to penetrate the origins of Covid-19, which continues to be rife in the world. WHO experts, however, judged the hypothesis of the leakage of the coronavirus from a laboratory in the city “highly improbable”, a theory supported for a time by the United States. The administration of former President Donald Trump had accused the Wuhan Institute of Virology of having let the virus escape, voluntarily or not. Notable fact: the expert author of the tweet, Peter Daszak, is the president of the EcoHealth Alliance. This association based in the United States and specializing in disease prevention has collaborated with this virology institute on certain projects.

American skepticism

The new Biden administration distanced itself Tuesday from the theory of a laboratory leak, defended in particular by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. However, she seemed to welcome the first conclusions of the WHO experts with skepticism and called for them to be verified by the American services. “Rather than jumping to conclusions that can be driven by anything but science, we want to see where the data takes us, where the science takes us, and our conclusions will be based on that,” the spokesperson said. of American diplomacy Ned Price.

 

Mike Pompeo had accused Beijing of having concealed the real number of Covid-19 patients. The former secretary of state had also not completely ruled out the hypothesis of a deliberate spread of the virus by China.

 

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