By Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the man in charge of the World Health Organisation, privately thinks that the Covid pandemic began after a lab leak in China, according to the UK’s Daily Mail. The change in heart comes months after emails revealed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President, and Dr. Francis Collins, former head of the NIH, worked together to prevent the lab leak theory from gaining traction with the public.
Fauci and Collins were criticized for “working the media” to shut down debate over the best way to deal with the pandemic, “quashing dissent,” by Wall Street Journal. The media love affair, however, seems to be changing.
Some have suspected that Fauci not only stifled attempts to reveal evidence of a lab leak, but in many ways, may have actually helped fund the creation of COVID-19.
In a March 2022 bombshell investigation, Vanity Fair, wrote with the subtitle, “Chasing scientific renown, grant dollars, and approval from Dr. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak transformed the environmental nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance into a government-funded sponsor of risky, cutting-edge virus research in both the U.S. and Wuhan, China. Drawing on more than 100,000 leaked documents a V.F. investigation shows how an organization dedicated to preventing the next pandemic found itself suspected of helping start one.”
The magazine continued, “In 2014, Fauci’s agency had issued a $3.7 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to predicting and helping to prevent the next pandemic by identifying viruses that could leap from wildlife to humans. The grant, titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, proposed to screen wild and captive bats in China, analyze sequences in the laboratory to gauge the risk of bat viruses infecting humans, and build predictive models to examine future risk. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was a key collaborator to whom EcoHealth Alliance gave almost $600,000 in sub-awards. But the work there had been controversial enough that the NIH suspended the grant in July 2020.”
Just last week, Fauci still held his ground, telling the Senate HELP committee that the Coronavirus probably came from a “natural occurrence” instead of the Wuhan virus lab. Although he claimed to be open to the lab leak idea, he claimed that the evidence shows that COVID jumped from “an animal host, perhaps through an intermediary host, into a human species which then spread throughout the human population.”
The Head of the WHO’s is the latest major health figure who disagrees with Fauci’s certainty.
The Daily Mail wrote, “While publicly the group maintains that ‘all hypotheses remain on the table’ about the origins of Covid, the source said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), had recently confided to a senior European politician that the most likely explanation was a catastrophic accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, where infections first spread during late 2019.
The Mail on Sunday first revealed concerns within Western intelligence services about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists were manipulating coronaviruses sampled from bats in caves nearly 1,000 miles away – the same caves where Covid-19 is suspected to have originated – in April 2020. The worldwide death toll from the Covid pandemic is now estimated to have hit more than 18 million.
Last year, the WHO established the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (Sago) to outline which studies would be needed to identify the origins of SARS-CoV-2 – as Covid is scientifically known – and to ‘create a global framework for studying the origins of emerging and re-emerging pathogens’.
An original probe into the outbreak by the WHO was resisted fiercely by China, leading to a report that concluded the SARS-CoV-2 virus probably passed to humans from a bat via another unidentified species.”
A Fauci and WHO rivalry may end up putting the White House in a tight spot. The Biden Administration has lately pushed to give the World Health Organization Director-General “nearly unlimited, unilateral authority to declare a public health emergency in any nation of his choosing without local input,” which, in a way, takes power away from Fauci.
It would not be the first time that Dr. Fauci and the WHO have had disagreements. In June 2020, The WHO said that the transmission of COVID-19 by those who never showed symptoms was “rare,” which the American doctor immediately challenged as “not correct” during an interview with Good Morning America. The WHO eventually had to walk back its statement.
For their part, the WHO has also received its fair share of criticism over the past few years, which makes the new rumored stance by Tedros so compelling. During the early days of the pandemic, he and his organization were accused of shielding China from culpability. In April 2020, Foreign Policy called the WHO “China’s Coronavirus Accomplice,” but things have seemed to change since.
Tedros recently attacked China’s “Zero Covid” policy as unworkable, and the communist leaders in China immediately censored him on that nation’s social media platforms. The Washington Post noted, “The comment by Tedros, once seen as an ally of Beijing, is a setback for China, which has strenuously defended its ‘dynamic clearing’ covid policy.”
The lab leak theory has long been seen as plausible, if not likely. In August 2021, Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee released an intelligence report that “cited ‘ample evidence’ that Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) scientists – aided by U.S. experts and Chinese and U.S. government funds – were working to modify coronaviruses to infect humans and such manipulation could be hidden.”
In early 2020, Senator Tom Cotton was called a fringe conspiracy theorist for believing that the virus may have been created in a lab. He’s since been taking a victory lap, calling those who dismissed his claims ” “reporters [and] activists in white lab coats.” With the head of the WHO now on his side, one wonders what kinds of investigations will occur if the Republicans take the Senate back in the 2022 midterms.
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