Scientists and Western governments have raised serious doubts about the WHO coronavirus investigation. The report is not only misleading, it suggests Beijing is involved in a cover up.
It didn’t take long for researchers and the Biden administration to sharply challenge the WHO investigation – the first undertaken by the organization, and the only international team allowed into China since the pandemic began in 2019.
The study was publicly billed as a World Health Organization investigation but was renamed recently as a “joint WHO/China investigation” and was accompanied on its release by a statement from the organization’s director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu, which read in part: “WHO calls for further studies, data on origin of SARS-CoV-2 virus, reiterates that all hypotheses remain open”.
The United States alleges Beijing not only wrote a significant portion of the report, but also limited what international investigators were allowed to investigate.
My own review of the 300-page report revealed misleading conclusions which strongly suggest China’s regime is covering up the real cause of the Wuhan outbreak.
WATCH: Part one of the interview with Prof. Nikolai Petrovsky of Flinders University (above).
Lab Leak Theory
The WHO report lists four possible causes of the outbreak in order of their likelihood. The panel concluded the most likely origin of the outbreak was a zoonotic transmission from animal (potentially a bat) to a human.
The second most likely possibility was that the virus evolved through an intermediate animal like a pangolin to a human.
Transmission through frozen foods was third on the list of likely culprits.
The least likely cause according to the panel, was an accidental lab leak.
In reality, there’s little available evidence to support the three initial scenarios and a significant amount of evidence to support the lab leak, as I first reported last May.
Scientists cannot explain how quickly the virus adapted from bats to humans. A typical zoonotic process would require a longer evolutionary timeline and many more contacts between infected animals and humans but this never happened.
Chinese scientists have also tested thousands of species and food sources for signs of contamination but could not find a single match to the coronavirus.
That leaves scientists with only one remaining possibility – a leak from one of the labs at the Wuhan Institute of Virology which housed the largest bat coronavirus database in the world.
Researchers at the institute had been experimenting on bat coronaviruses including gain of function experiments which augment an existing genome by splicing it together with another genome, making it more amenable to human cells.
Prof Nikolai Petrovsky of Flinders University in Adelaide joined Zev Shalev and Noel Casler on the podcast to explain his research, which he says proves a lab leak is the only possible cause.
“What came out of the study was that [the coronavirus] was optimally designed to infect and transmit between humans, and every other animal species was below human. There is no evidence [that] virus was in humans prior to, October, November, December 2019. The only plausible answer is it saw human cells in the laboratory.”
Professor Nikolai Petrovsky, Flinders University on Narativ
WATCH: Nina Burleigh joins Petrovsky for Part 2 of the podcast. Burleigh’s upcoming book is called ‘Virus’ and is available as a pre-order today at most booksellers like Amazon.
Petrovsky initially struggled to gain public attention for his study because he says the virology community is concerned that disclosure would hurt their reputation and future funding.
“It was just being blocked, and it still hasn’t officially been published to this day. We think we might be on the cusp of getting it accepted nine months after we submitted it. It’s quite extraordinary. And it’s a very innocent paper.”
Author and journalist Nina Burleigh will soon publish ‘Virus’, out May 18. Burleigh says the scientific community must take a stand. “I think people like David Relman at Stanford, if more people would come out and say, it’s quite possible that this is an accident, then they have to come back and make some changes,” Burleigh said.
One question does remain unanswered: Was the virus accidentally or deliberately released? That’s a question few people want to answer or even entertain.
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