World Health Organization advisory board member, Jamie Metzl, says that China continues to hide crucial information about the origins of the coronavirus.
What he said: “The Chinese have engaged in a massive cover-up that is going on until this day, involving destroying samples, hiding records, placing a universal gag order on Chinese scientists and imprisoning Chinese citizen journalists asking the most basic questions,” Jamie Metzl told Fox News on Monday.
“The more that China stonewalls, the more suspicious that it looks,” he noted.
“China may not want to investigate the origins of this pandemic … but we can’t give China a veto over whether or not we investigate the world’s worst pandemic in a century and then do everything we can to make everybody safe,” Metzl said.
“There’s a reason why after a plane crashes, we do everything possible to understand what happened,” Metzl explained. “If we don’t learn those lessons, there are other planes that are in the air. For all we know, the next pandemic is just around the corner and if we don’t understand and fix our biggest problems, we’re going to be at unnecessary risk. We have to get to the bottom of this, which means asking that tough questions and following the data wherever it leads.”
How we got here: Metzl’s comments come as the lab leak theory has started to gain more traction in recent weeks. The possibility that the virus might have originated in a Wuhan lab in China was largely dismissed last year by the media and some politicians as a “fringe” and “conspiracy” theory.
The WHO probe: The World Health Organization sent a team to Wuhan, China to investigate the origins of the coronavirus that shuttered businesses and most of the economy last year. The investigative team’s findings were inconclusive. They said it is more likely that the virus jumped from animals to humans and “extremely unlikely” that the virus escaped from a lab. The organization said it cannot dismiss either theory.
It’s worth noting that Beijing did not allow for an independent investigation into the matter.
Metzl told CBS News in March that Chinese officials conducted the “primary investigation” and then the WHO investigative team went on what he called a “study tour.”
“Everybody around the world is imagining this is some kind of full investigation. It’s not. This group of experts only saw what the Chinese government wanted them to see,” Metzl said.
“We would have to ask the question, ‘Well, why in Wuhan?’ To quote Humphrey Bogart, ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, why Wuhan?’ What Wuhan does have is China’s level four virology institute, with probably the world’s largest collection of bat viruses, including bat coronaviruses,” he noted.
Metzl also said that investigators “didn’t demand access to the records and samples and key personnel” while they were at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“That’s because of the ground rules China set with the WHO, which has never had the authority to make demands or enforce international protocols,” he said.
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