The Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was handling coronaviruses “without potentially having the same level of expertise or safety or who knows,” Peter Ben Embarek said during a conference call in January, according to footage shown by TV2. Ben Embarek is a WHO expert on disease transmission from animals to humans and one of the team’s leaders.
But months later, when WHO released its dense report on its mission to Wuhan, the UN health agency concluded that a leak of the virus from the lab was “extremely unlikely” to have caused Covid-19.
In recent weeks, however, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has acknowledged it was “premature“ to rule out a possible lab leak as the source of Covid-19, saying last month that he was asking China to be more transparent about the early days of the pandemic.
The Danish documentary featured Ben Embarek expressing his worries in January about the Wuhan branch of the Chinese CDC, concerns that have never been publicly disclosed by WHO.
“What is more concerning to me is the other lab,” Ben Embarek said. “The one that is next to the market,” he explained, referring to the Wuhan branch of the Chinese CDC, located just 500 metres (547 yards) away from the Huanan market.
