The World Health Organization - which praised China's early efforts at 'containing' COVID-19, parroted CCP propaganda about transmissibility, and refused to declare a pandemic until March 11 (allegedly at the request of Chinese President Xi Jinping) - has conducted "extensive discussions" with scientists in Wuhan to piece together the 'natural' origin of the outbreak, according to Reuters.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping
The 'fact finding mission' included talks on animal health research, according to a WHO spokesman.
"The team had extensive discussions with Chinese counterparts and received updates on epidemiological studies, biologic and genetic analysis and animal health research," said the WHO's Christian Lindmeir, who added that the investigation included video discussions with Wuhan virologists and scientists.
The three-week advance mission comprising two specialists in animal health and epidemiology was tasked with laying the groundwork for a broader team of Chinese and international experts that will seek to discover how the virus that causes COVID-19 jumped the species barrier from animals to humans. -Reuters
The WHO's official position is that COVID-19 crossed over from bats to humans through an unknown intermediary animal - and has ruled out the possibility that the Wuhan-based virus escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology, whose lead bat scientist Shi Zhengli sparked an international ethics debate in 2015 over the genetic modifyication of bat coronaviruses for human transmissibility.
In mid-April, the Washington Post reported that the US State Department received two cables from US Embassy officials in 2018 warning of inadequate safety at Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting 'risky studies' on bat coronaviruses, according to the report - which noted that the cables "fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus."
And so, the WHO' three-week 'advance mission' led by two specialists in animal health and epidemiology, have been "tasked with laying the groundwork for a broader team of Chinese and international experts that will seek to discover how the virus that causes COVID-19 jumped the species barrier from animals to humans," according to the report.
Notably - US experts have been excluded from the WHO mission, while the organization's chief of emergencies, Mike Ryan, offered a hint as to the direction this 'natural origin' hunt is going - saying in a statement "The fact that that fire alarm was triggered (in Wuhan) doesn’t necessarily mean that that is where the disease crossed from animals to human."
We wonder if the WHO asked why Beijing ordered labs across China to destroy coronavirus samples in early January?