Soooooo China & WHO kinda screwed us with Covid after all

Helen Clark-led Covid-19 independent review panel criticises China, WHO

An independent panel says Chinese officials could have applied public health measures more forcefully in January to curb the initial Covid-19 outbreak, and criticised the World Health Organisation (WHO) for not declaring an international emergency until 30 January.

Interestingly the lack of detail from China keeps the door to the lab escape theory…

Coronavirus: Scientists say it’s still too early to rule out lab leak as source of COVID-19 pandemic

The origin of the novel coronavirus is still unclear and the theory that it was caused by a laboratory leak needs to be taken seriously until there is a rigorous data-led investigation that proves it wrong, a group of leading scientists said.

COVID-19, which emerged in China in late 2019, has killed 3.34 million people, cost the world trillions of dollars in lost income and upended normal life for billions of people.

“More investigation is still needed to determine the origin of the pandemic,” said the 18 scientists, including Ravindra Gupta, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Cambridge, and Jesse Bloom, who studies the evolution of viruses at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

“Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable,” the scientists including David Relman, professor of microbiology at Stanford, said in a letter to the journal Science.

The authors of the letter said the World Health Organization’s investigation into the origins of the virus had not made a “balanced consideration” of the theory that it may have come from a laboratory incident.

…with so much at stake and with the Pandemic far from over, the origins of Covid and any possible compensation are secondary to the immediate threat of the ongoing pandemic and the next new outbreak of a different virus.

This is just another fault line on which China and America are pushing.

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