Gordon G. Chang: China's People Will Tell the World the Truth About COVID-19

Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the World Health Organization's (WHO) last mission to Wuhan, is now saying that COVID-19 could have been caused by a lab accident. "A lab employee infected in the field while collecting samples in a bat cave—such a scenario belongs both as a lab-leak hypothesis and as our first hypothesis of direct infection from bat to human," he told Danish state-owned television station TV2 in a documentary that aired last Thursday. "We've seen that hypothesis as a likely hypothesis."

Now he tells us. Embarek sang a very different tune in an interview with Science in February. More important, his mission's final report listed a lab leak as "an extremely unlikely pathway" and as the least probable scenario, even less likely than transmission by frozen food.

How did the report come to this startling conclusion? As Embarek explained in the Danish documentary, a Chinese colleague would allow a mention of the possibility of a lab leak "on the condition we didn't recommend any specific studies to further that hypothesis."

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