In Stunning Reversal, WHO Chief Says Ruling Out COVID Lab Leak Theory Was 'Premature'

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared Thursday that ruling out the lab leak theory for the origin of the Wuhan coronavirus was "premature" after those who questioned the possibility of COVID being lab-created were mocked, fact-checked, and dismissed for months — including by the WHO.

"I was a lab technician myself, I’m an immunologist, and I have worked in the lab, and lab accidents happen," Tedros said, adding such accidents are "common."

The comments from the WHO Director-General are a stunning but clear contradiction to a March 2021 WHO report investigating the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus.

That report — on which China was a dubious partner — stated a lab leak was "extremely unlikely" and instead concluded that the most probable origin was a natural jump from animals to humans. That conclusion was convenient for China, as its Communist ruling party seeks to avoid blame for the global pandemic, but one that apparently wasn't based on a full analysis of data necessary to reach a conclusion.

The head of the World Health Organization said that investigations into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in China were being hampered by the lack of raw data on the first days of spread there and urged it to be more transparent pic.twitter.com/ZtrFxgO8eg
— Reuters (@Reuters) July 15, 2021

Even Tedros, the head of the WHO — who won his post with the organization after China supported his bid — is now critical of what he calls a "premature push" to rule out the lab leak theory after he and his organization spent months going along with China's propaganda.

During a trip to China as the pandemic spread, Tedros said he had "no doubt about China’s commitment to transparency," but now he's apparently gotten a clue. In a rare moment of criticism, Tedros now says "getting access to raw data had been a challenge" and is calling on the Chinese government "to be more transparent" as the WHO continues to probe the origins of COVID-19.

As Katie reported, "early last year Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emailed Dr. Anthony Fauci offering a partnership to promote and police information about Wuhan coronavirus. That led to Facebook, at Fauci's direction, censoring the lab leak theory for more than year. Only recently did Facebook start allowing posts about the theory, which is exceedingly credible, to remain on the platform."

Psaki says the White House has been flagging "problematic posts" on Facebook they believe are misinformation about Wuhan coronavirus. Reminder: Fauci worked with Facebook to ban the lab leak theory, which is factual, for more than a year.
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) July 15, 2021

When hundreds of pages of Dr. Fauci's emails were made public earlier this summer, it became clear that Fauci had been aware of the potential a lab leak in China unleashed the Wuhan coronavirus, but "that's not what he said publicly as he rejected the possibility of a lab leak in interviews, during testimony to Congress and during official White House Task Force briefings. On April 18, 2020, three months after being told the virus looked engineered, Fauci told reporters at the White House, unequivocally, it didn't come from a lab. Most of the media then reported his remarks as 'debunking' a conspiracy theory."

This reversal on the lab leak theory is hardly the first time Tedros and the World Health Organization have been forced to backtrack after going along with the ChiCom party line.

In the early days of the pandemic as the Wuhan coronavirus spread, the WHO repeated China's misinformation that there was "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" before reversing their stance a week later.

Tedros also, early on in the pandemic, used his post as the head of the WHO to urge countries against limiting travel or trade, advice President Trump wisely ignored when he issued travel restrictions on China months before the WHO got around to declaring the Wuhan coronavirus a pandemic.