A truth that could harm "international harmony": The virus did not come from China

COVID 19 leaked from laboratories in America, not in China, as sensationally claimed, according to the British Daily Mail.

Source: index.hr Tuesday, 5.07.2022. | 13:52

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EPA/EFE/Sashenka Gutierrez

As this article points out, the famous U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs, who led a two-year investigation into the origin of the pandemic, said that he was "quite convinced" that the virus was the result of "American laboratory biotechnology".

He made the claim last month at a global conference, after which Chinese government officials requested a "thorough investigation." Professor Sachs, who was twice named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine, admitted that "we don't know for sure".

"But there's enough evidence that it should be investigated, and it's not being investigated -- not in the U.S., not anywhere. I think for the right reasons (U.S. officials) don't want to sweep too much under the rug," said Sachs, who critics described as as a 'propagandist' of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

It is not clear whether Professor Sachs believes that COVID originated in the US or is the result of collaboration between American and Chinese scientists in Wuhan. Namely, China faced accusations of covering up the origin of COVID in its own backyard.

Scientists were found to have deleted key databases and stifled independent investigations in a laboratory just miles from ground zero of the pandemic. The virus first began to spread from a food market in Wuhan, about 13 kilometers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that worked with dangerous coronaviruses.

Researchers who fell ill with the mysterious flu-like virus months before the first recorded case were silenced or disappeared. Professor Sachs is chairman of the Lancet Covid-19 Committee, established at the start of the pandemic to help governments around the world. He oversaw a 12-person task force investigating the origins of Covid-19 that was disbanded in September 2021.

The famous economist has previously said that he believes the pandemic is the result of experiments by Chinese and American scientists. But so far, claims that the virus was created in the US have only come from the Chinese side.

However, Sachs made it clear at a June 15 conference organized by the Spanish globalization think-tank Gate Center that the virus came from American laboratories.

"I'm pretty confident that the virus came from American laboratory biotechnology, not from nature. So, in my opinion, it's a failure of biotechnology, not an accident or a natural spillover," he said.

Official correspondence leaked

On the other hand, the Chinese are now asking to investigate where the virus came from. Hua Chunying, China's assistant foreign minister, wrote on his Twitter profile: "Given the huge human and economic toll the virus has taken, don't we owe the millions of lives lost a thorough investigation by US labs?"

Namely, the Chinese have been claiming for some time that COVID originated from the U.S. military base in Maryland. However, the rest of the world did not take such accusations seriously. In public, the mainstream media and academics in the West have called the theory of the virus leaking from the labs a conspiracy theory. But leaked email correspondence showed top scientists advising the UK and US governments were privately expressing concerns about the official report.

Jeremy Farrar, a British expert who has publicly denounced the theory as a "conspiracy", admitted in a private email in February 2020 that the "plausible explanation" is that the virus was man-made. In a message sent to U.S. health leaders Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, Jeremy said it is possible that COVID evolved from a Sars-like virus in a laboratory.

He went on to say that this seemingly benign process may have 'accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans'. But the British scientist was "matched" by his colleagues in the US who warned that further discussion about the origin of the virus could harm "international harmony".

As the Daily Mail further writes, sources from the US government last month determined that the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Ghebreyesus, privately believes that the COVID pandemic began after a leak in China.

Additionally, he is said to have recently told a high-ranking European politician in confidence that the most likely explanation for the spread of the virus was a catastrophic accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, where infections first spread in late 2019. This month, Ghebreyesus informed the WHO member states about the pandemic, where he claims that there is still no official answer as to where the virus originated.

"We still don't have the answers to where it came from or how it entered the human population. Understanding the origin of the virus scientifically is very important for preventing future epidemics and pandemics. But morally, we owe it to all those who suffered and died and their families. The longer it lasts, the more difficult it becomes. We must speed up that process. All hypotheses must remain on the table until we have evidence that allows us to rule out or reject certain hypotheses. That is why it is even more urgent to separate this scientific work from politics. The way to prevent politicization is for countries to share data and samples transparently and without interference from any government. The only way this scientific work can progress successfully is with the full cooperation of all countries, including China, where the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 were reported," concluded the head of the WHO.