The Biden administration is taking partial credit for the World Health Organization’s decision to backtrack on releasing an early summary of findings from the joint China-WHO team, which conducted an early 2021 investigation into the coronavirus origins.
The United Nations agency will release the executive summary and full report simultaneously in mid-March, it announced Thursday. Two dozen scientists wrote an open letter Thursday calling for an independent investigation into how the pandemic began in China, saying the WHO-China joint inquiry in Wuhan was flawed due to Chinese influence and a lack of transparency by China’s government.
Biden press secretary Jen Psaki was asked on Friday about China’s transparency problems related to the WHO’s inquiry and about whether the president might move toward former President Donald Trump’s position that the WHO was not worth it for the United States.
“Well, I would actually say that we’re gratified that the WHO has determined to hold on releasing an interim report into the origins of COVID. That was a positive step, which was taken, in part, because of our involvement and engagement,” Psaki said. “In recent weeks, we have spoken with many international allies and partners who shared our concern about the ways in which early findings of the investigation were, you know, had shared the same concerns. We feel this is an encouraging sign — that U.S. reengagement is already having a positive impact.”
The Trump administration pulled out of the WHO, citing the group botching its response to the pandemic and China’s influence, but the Biden administration quickly rejoined.
WHO SETS DATE FOR COVID-19 ORIGINS REPORT
Psaki was asked Friday if her comments meant Biden is satisfied with how the WHO’s work on its report is going.
“No, it’s not, it’s not — they’re holding on it,” Psaki replied, adding that “I would say he feels it’s a positive sign, as I just said, because they’re not releasing a report where we expressed concerns about the origin of the data, the lack of transparency, and that we felt it would send a negative message about — not a negative message, I should say — kind of the inaccurate message about the origins of the pandemic, and that engagement, that outcome, was in part because of our engagements.”
She added that “we’ll look at the data in the report — we have long said we’d like to see the underlying data, but again we feel the hold on releasing the interim report was — we were gratified by that step that was taken” when asked if the president had confidence in the credibility of the upcoming WHO report.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that “China has not been fully and effectively transparent, either at the start of this crisis, when it mattered most, or even today, as investigations are going forward trying to get to the bottom of what happened.”
National security adviser Jake Sullivan cast doubt on the WHO investigation in February, saying, “We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them.”
The WHO itself discussed the report Friday, with Michael Ryan, the head of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, saying that the WHO had never intended to release an interim report.
“Just to clarify, there was never a plan, I believe, for an interim report, first off all,” Ryan said. “There was — it was hoped that we would get a summary report out. Given the interest in this area and given the tremendous demand for detailed information — we saw that with a huge and understandable demand for that information — the team itself felt that getting the full report done, the full report could taken a lot longer, and what the team have done, to their credit, is really work hard to try and come up with their full report so we can have a proper discussion around a full report rather than having two discussions.”
Ryan added that “this is really trying to facilitate a good discussion with the international community, with media, with the public around what will be a full report.”
Peter Ben Embarek, head of the WHO group that investigated the origins, said during a video interview Feb. 26 that “we didn’t do an audit of any of these labs, so we don’t really have hard facts or detailed data on the work done” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“We decided to go for publishing and issuing both reports at the same time — both the summary report and the full report because they follow each other, and it makes sense to issue them together at the same time,” Embarek said. “The current timing is that the week of the 15th of March.”
Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, said in February that “the ledger on the side of an explanation that says that this resulted from some kind of human error, it far outweighs the side of the scale that says this was some natural outbreak.” He previously called the WHO-China investigation a “Potemkin exercise.”
Trump officials such as former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have pointed to evidence suggesting COVID-19 might have originated in a Wuhan lab.
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In early February, Embarek said the possibility the coronavirus might have escaped from the Wuhan lab didn’t merit further inquiry, but days later, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reversed that, saying more study was needed.
While in Wuhan, Embarek announced four main hypotheses: direct transmission from animal to human, transmission through an intermediate species, transmission through frozen foods, and a “laboratory-related incident.” A jump from animal to another animal to humans was most likely, and an accidental release was “extremely unlikely,” he said.
The Chinese government denies the coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab and has cast doubt on the idea that it originated in China.
