WHO adviser: China pushing animal-to-human explanation for COVID; trying to avoid lab scenario
WHO adviser Jamie Metzl offers analysis on 'The Ingraham Angle'
Atlantic Council senior fellow and World Health Organization adviser Jamie Metzl said Monday on "The Ingraham Angle" that China appears to be doing everything it can to press the issue that the coronavirus began as a zoonotic virus jumping to humans, rather than a leak or other sourcing from a virology lab in Wuhan, Hubei Province.
INGRAHAM: You say this [WHO-China] report is not credible. For our viewers, why is this very unlikely that the story would have unfolded from a bat to a person without any lab involvement?
JAMIE METZL: So there's two points. One is why is it not credible: People feel this must be a World Health Organization investigation. It's not. It's not an investigation and the World Health Organization isn't doing it. It's an independent committee with their Chinese government counterparts. So anything that they come out with is going to be a compromise, a consensus between this committee and the Chinese government.
It could be possible that COVID-19 began through a zoonotic jump through animal hosts. It also could very well be possible that it comes from an accidental lab leak. There's a lot of evidence that suggests -- it's all circumstantial -- that that is a very, very real possibility, that the virus comes from horseshoe bats that are more than a thousand miles away from Wuhan, but what Wuhan has is China's only level four virology institute, the world's largest collection of bat coronaviruses that was doing dangerous gain of function research with a spotty security record and we have this massive Chinese cover-up that came afterwards.
So nobody knows or very few people know what exactly the story was, but at the very least, we need a full and credible investigation exploring all hypotheses.