The World Health Organization’s newly announced COVID-19 origins investigation team features several holdovers from the entity’s first compromised mission in addition to collaborators of Wuhan Institute of Virology partner EcoHealth Alliance, The National Pulse can reveal.
The second round of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) origins investigation effort follows the first round of investigators, which included individuals who failed to disclose their ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Chinese Communist Party, despite confidently dispelling the “lab leak” theory.
Team member Christian Drosten, one of the 26 newly announced investigators, was a signatory on the infamous Lancet letter on the origins of COVID-19, which was organized by chief Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborator and Anthony Fauci-funded researcher Peter Daszak. The letter prematurely debunked the possibility of COVID-19 counting lab origins and failed to disclose its authors’ conflicts of interest.
Another individual appointed to the WHO team, Supaporn Wacharapluesadee, is also tied to Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.
Wacharapluesadee was listed as a co-investigator on a grant application led by Daszak from August 2020. The paper focused on the emergence of zoonotic diseases in Southeast Asia with experiments including the “building of chimeric SARS-like bat coronaviruses.”
Holdovers from the WHO’s original, compromised COVID-19 origins investigation team account for six members of the new team:
- Marion Koopmans;
- Thea Fischer;
- John Watson;
- Vladimir Dedkov;
- Hung Nguyen-Viet;
- Elmoubasher Farag.
The National Pulse has previously exposed Marion Koopmans’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party, including advising Chinese state-run scientific bodies and accepting grants from the regime.
In an interview unearthed by The National Pulse, fellow holdover Thea Fischer admitted that the previous WHO investigation was not a “lab audit” but merely a question-and-answer exercise with Wuhan lab personnel.
“This is based only on questioning, not us coming with swabs, and testing, or serology, follow-up or looking into lab locks because it was not a lab audit. We were there to question and to interview together.”
The WHO effort also features Yungui Yang, the Deputy Director at the Chinese Communist Party-run Beijing Institute of Genomics.
