Chinese critics decry WHO's Wuhan probe as a "farce"
Reporter : Eva Fu / Publisher : The Epoch Times PREMIUM
A Chinese dissident has condemned the World Health Organization’s findings on the source of the pandemic as a “farce,” adding that the Chinese regime is likely to leverage them to deflect responsibility for causing the global crisis.
According to Yuan Hongbing, a Chinese academic and vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) living in Australia, the WHO investigation in Wuhan was akin to “a farce staged by the Chinese regime.”
“We could have predicted that this so-called investigation would come to this,” he said in an interview.
As a team of experts at the WHO wrapped up its trip on Feb. 9, Peter Ben Embarek, a Danish scientist who led the WHO mission, dismissed the theory that the CCP virus may have leaked from a virology lab as “extremely unlikely.” Bats, he said, remained a likely source.
The State Department has cast doubt on the amount of transparency afforded to the WHO team and said that the United States would present its conclusion after reviewing the full WHO report.
Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” described Embarek’s comments as “intensely political.”
“This mission to Wuhan is heavily negotiated with conditions that were really essentially designed so they are not going to find out anything,” Chang told The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” program.
“They are there for a month, two weeks of which are quarantine, and they go to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for three-and-a-half hours,” he said. The team visited the lab on Feb. 3.
“I don’t know how WHO members can say that after such a cursory examination.”
The wet market went through a thorough cleansing in March 2020, destroying all the livestock and goods stored inside. Zhang Meng (alias), a volunteer who helped with the cleanout, said that they stripped everything bare during the process.
“Nothing was left save the metal board,” he said in a recent interview, adding that the WHO team had nothing to see there. “Everything was gone in a sweep.”
Chang also criticized Embarek for lending credibility to the idea that the virus could have been imported via frozen foods to the Wuhan wet market, where the first known cluster of cases emerged in December 2019. The investigator said transmission of the virus via frozen food is a possibility that warrants further investigation.
Chinese authorities have attributed local COVID-19 outbreaks to imported frozen foods, despite the WHO and U.S. health officials both saying there is no evidence that people can contract COVID-19 from food or food packaging.
“Experts will tell you that yes, the coronavirus can survive on frozen food packaging, but nobody in any responsible position outside China thinks that it was a likely source of transmission,” Chang said.
“This is a parroting of a Beijing narrative,” he said. “This just shows you that the WHO mission is completely worthless—actually is worse than worthless because it’s throwing people off the trail.”
The Trump administration last year began the process to withdraw from the WHO, as the agency was criticized for repeating Beijing’s narratives about the outbreak. President Joe Biden, upon taking office, reversed the decision and restored WHO ties on Jan. 20.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Feb. 9 also questioned WHO’s findings, saying he doesn’t believe “they [experts] got access that they needed.”
“I must say the reason we left the World Health Organization was because we came to believe that it was corrupted, it had been politicized. It was bending a knee to General Secretary Xi Jinping in China,” he said in a Fox interview. He said the WHO announcement has not shaken his belief that “there’s significant evidence … that this [virus] may have very well come from that laboratory.”
Days before Pompeo left office, the State Department released a fact sheet stating that it had reason to believe several researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology exhibited COVID-19-like symptoms in autumn 2019, despite a senior facility virologist saying otherwise.
Matt Pottinger, the former deputy national security adviser, later called for more attention to the fact sheet, which he said was “very carefully vetted” by officials across the Department of Health and Human Services, White House, and intelligence leadership.
Peter Daszak, a U.S. scientist on the WHO team, has co-written papers with Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan virology lab. He previously condemned the lab escape theory as a “conspiracy,” but later conceded that he did so “as a showing of support” for Chinese scientists to shield them from “online harassment.”
In a tweet on Feb. 9 in response to the State Department’s comments, Dazsak said that Biden “has to look tough on China.” “Please don’t rely too much on US intel: increasingly disengaged under Trump [and] frankly wrong on many aspects,” he wrote.
Heng He, a China affairs commentator, said that Daszak’s involvement in the research constituted a conflict of interest.
“Why did the WHO recuse him?” he said. “This is basically signaling to the CCP that the WHO will go along with its play.”
He also noted the WHO’s visit to a propaganda exhibition touting Beijing’s achievements in combating the virus. “It doesn’t even count as fourth-hand evidence,” he said. “Just purely man-made stories.”
Cathy He contributed to this report.
Ref : https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-critics-decry-whos-wuhan-probe-as-a-farce_3692886.html
News (7)
Australian expert from the WHO investigation team: the epidemic originated in China
Editor : Zhang Hui / https://www.ntdtv.com/gb/2021/02/12/a103052751.html / Direct translation
After completing the investigation in Wuhan, the WHO expert team announced its conclusions with Chinese experts on 9 February, claiming that the virus is extremely unlikely to come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It also claimed that there is no evidence that Wuhan will have a major epidemic before December 2019. break out. The WHO's quotation of the Chinese Communist Party's previous statement raised questions.
When the former US Secretary of State Pompeo was interviewed by the Fox news program "American’s Newsroom," he expressed doubts about the WHO's assessment. He said that the Trump administration's decision to withdraw from the WHO was just seeing its corruption and bombarding the politicization of the WHO and kneeling to Xi Jinping.
Pompeo said that there is important evidence that the CCP virus originated in a Chinese laboratory.
Professor Dominic Dwyer, a microbiologist and infectious disease expert from the NSW Department of Health, is the only Australian in the 14-member team that went to Wuhan to investigate this time. The team is committed to determining the source of the epidemic.
Professor Dwyer said in an interview with News Network on the 9th, “I think the epidemic started in China.” “I think the evidence that the epidemic started from other parts of the world is actually very limited. There is some evidence, but it is not very convincing. force."
Dwyer flew back to Sydney from China on the 10th and is currently isolated in the hotel.
He said that the "most likely source" of the virus was bats, and then it was animals like cats that passed the virus to humans. "I think the outbreak of the epidemic in the Wuhan market is indeed an amplified event. Before that, The virus may have been circulating in the community for several weeks."
The head of the WHO investigation team, Peter Ben Embarek, said that although no conclusion has been reached, the mission worked. "Compared with before, has our situation changed drastically? I don't think so. Have we increased our awareness and learned more about the specific situation? Of course it is."
The 14 scientists arrived in Wuhan, Hubei, China on 14 January and entered the community after being isolated for 14 days. In two busy weeks, this team of virologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, and food safety experts visited key locations related to the epidemic. So far, the CCP virus has caused 2.3 million deaths worldwide.
The investigation included Wuhan Huanan Seafood Market, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Hubei Provincial Hospital.
Chinese scientists from the WHO investigation team claimed that the virus may have been brought into China through packaged frozen food. Dwyer believes that the evidence that the epidemic originated outside China is "very limited."
WHO experts stated on the evening of the 9th that the virus is most likely to be transmitted from animals to humans. Professor Dwyer said that one of the key differences is trying to reach agreement on what happened before the outbreak in the Wuhan market.
"For example, some other evidence-genetic analysis of the virus, etc., will show that the virus may have spread since mid-November or early December last year." He said.
"We also know that the Chinese reported that people who went to the hospital were seriously ill, but we now know - to be fair, they didn't know (the epidemic) at the time. But we now know that the virus is spreading among other healthy people, So there must be more cases in December last year than confirmed."
When asked if he believes there will be a clear conclusion about how the virus started, Dwyer said he hopes there will be. "In fact, many of these outbreaks take years to resolve, so part of the WHO's work is to recommend what kind of research is needed to resolve these issues in the next year or so."
Australian Prime Minister Morrison was one of the first world leaders to call for an investigation into the origin of the epidemic. This action triggered a diplomatic counterattack by the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese Communist government launched a trade crackdown of more than A$20 billion against six or seven industries in Australia.
News (8)
No comments:
Post a Comment