Covid-19 origin: WHO official expressed concerns about safety at lab near Wuhan market, shows report

A top official of the World Health Organization-led team that visited China earlier this year to study the origins of the Covid said that he had expressed his concerns about the safety standards at a laboratory close to the seafood market where the first cases were reported, several news reports on Friday showed. The expert made these comments according to a documentary released on Thursday by Danish television channel TV2.

The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Wuhan branch was handling coronaviruses “without potentially having the same level of expertise or safety or who knows,” said Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO expert of disease transmission from animals to humans, the Associated Press reported, citing footage from the documentary. Ben Embarek made these remarks during a conference call earlier in January, the report further showed.

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In the documentary, Ben Embarek inspected the stalls at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan. He said that the exposure of people who worked in handling live animals in the market could have raised the possibility of the virus infecting people at the market, according to the AP’s report.

He also expressed his concerns about the Chinese CDC’s Wuhan branch, which were not previously disclosed by the WHO. Several experts have questioned the possibility of a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology but the CDC lab has not been the subject of such discussions. “What is more concerning to me is the other lab. The one that is next to the market,” AP quoted Ben Embarek as saying about the CDC lab, which is 500 meters away from the Huanan market. In a separate interview to the channel TV2 in June, Ben Embarek also had said that a lab staffer being infected with the coronavirus while collecting bat samples was “likely.” HT has not individually seen the documentary footage or the interview.

However, when the WHO released its findings after its mission in Wuhan, it termed the introduction of the disease through a laboratory incident as “extremely unlikely.” Further, the report also said that a direct zoonotic spillover is considered to be “a possible-to-likely pathway.” While the report showed that the introduction of the disease through an intermediate host is considered a “likely to very likely” pathway, it also said that the introduction through cold or food chain products is a “possible pathway.” Later, WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was “premature” to rule out the possibility of a lab leak of the virus.