WHO expert ‘had concerns’ about lab close to first COVID cases

LONDON (AP) — When a World Health Organization-led team travelled to China earlier this year to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, a top official said he was worried about safety standards at a laboratory close to the seafood market where the first human cases were detected, according to a documentary released Thursday by Danish television channel TV2.

The Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was handling coronaviruses “without potentially having the same level of expertise or safety or who knows,” Peter Ben Embarek said during a conference call in January, according to footage shown by TV2.

Ben Embarek is a WHO expert on disease transmission from animals to humans and one of the team's leaders

But months later, when WHO released its dense report on its mission to Wuhan, the UN health agency concluded that a leak of the virus from the lab was “extremely unlikely” to have caused COVID-19.

The WHO report even lent credence to a fringe theory promoted by the Chinese government that the virus may have been spread via frozen seafood packaging.

In recent weeks, however, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has acknowledged it was “ premature ” to rule out a possible lab leak as the source of COVID-19, saying last month that he was asking China to be more transparent about the early days of the pandemic.

“I was a lab technician myself. I'm an immunologist and I have worked in the lab and lab accidents happen,” Tedros said. “It's common.”

In the Danish TV2 documentary, the WHO's Ben Embarek is pictured arriving in China, inspecting the stalls at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan and examining what he hypothesises might have been living quarters for people who handled live animals there — raising the possibility that the virus may have jumped from animals to people at the market.

“It would mean that the contact between the human beings and whatever may have been in the market i.e. virus and maybe live animals would have been more intense,” Ben Embarek said.

“It goes without saying that the close contact would be doubled many times between humans and animals if you are among them around the clock.”

Scientists have previously thought that because many of the earliest known human cases at Wuhan's Huanan market appeared to have no prior connection to each other, the market might have simply been the place where cases were amplified, not where the virus first breached the species barrier.

All of the scientists on the WHO-led team were approved by China and the team's agenda and final report were also vetted by the Chinese government.

Ben Embarek told TV2 the purpose of the WHO team's visit was “collaboration and discussion” with China.

In a statement on Thursday, the WHO said the search for the pandemic's origins “should not be an exercise in attributing blame, finger-pointing or political point-scoring.”

The agency said its first analysis of the coronavirus origins found “there was insufficient scientific evidence to rule any of the hypotheses out.”

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