Covid Lab-Leak Revelation: WHO Expert Says China Pressure Led To His Team's 'Extremely Unlikely' Finding

A WHO food safety and animal diseases expert, who led the investigation into the origins of the novel coronavirus, has claimed that the March report that the Wuhan lab leak theory was "extremely unlikely" was influenced by Chinese officials in the team.

In a new documentary, The Virus Mystery, aired Thursday night on Danish television, Peter Ben Embarek said the Chinese researchers in the group were against connecting the origins of the pandemic to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, reported Washington Post.

"In the beginning, they didn’t want anything about the lab [in the report], because it was impossible, so there was no need to waste time on that," Ben Embarek said. “We insisted on including it, because it was part of the whole issue about where the virus originated.”

It was two days before the end of the mission that the group finally decided to include the lab-leak theory in the report. Ben Embarek said his Chinese counterpart agreed to discuss the theory in the report "on the condition we didn’t recommend any specific studies to further that hypothesis."

On whether the report’s use of the phrase "extremely unlikely" was required by the Chinese researchers, Ben Embarek said, "it was the category we chose to put it in at the end, yes." He added that the words indicated that the theory was not likely, but not impossible.

The documentary shows Ben Embarek arriving in China and inspecting the stalls at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan.

According to the food safety and animal diseases expert, the possibility of a lab staffer being infected with the coronavirus while collecting bat samples was "likely." A lab employee could have accidentally brought the virus to Wuhan after collecting samples in the field. This, according to him, would be both a lab-leak theory and a hypothesis of direct infection from a bat.

Ben Embarek said there could have been a human error though the Chinese political system won't accept it.

The documentary also had Embarek expressing his worries in January about the Wuhan branch of the Chinese CDC. These details were never revealed openly by the WHO.

"What is more concerning to me is the other lab. The one that is next to the market," he said, referring to the Wuhan branch of the Chinese CDC, located just 500 meters away from the Huanan market.

Embarek's revelations have added fuel to the Wuhan lab leak theory which gained traction as increasing numbers of scientists call for an independent investigation to be conducted by authorities beyond the WHO.

However, when asked about the interview, Embarek told Washington Post that the interview had been mistranslated in English-language media coverage. "It is a wrong translation from a Danish article," he said.

The WHO, in the report, said that an animal most likely passed the virus to humans after catching it from a bat. The team did not rule out that it could have come directly from a bat or from frozen food.