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A top World Health Organization (WHO) scientist who led an international mission to Wuhan, China two years ago to investigate the origins of COVID-19 has been fired for alleged sexual misconduct.
Danish food scientist Peter Ben Embarek, head of WHO one health An initiative aimed at controlling infectious diseases that spread between animals and humans last year “followed the discovery of sexual misconduct against him documented by an investigation and the corresponding disciplinary process,” according to the United Nations agency. It was rejected.
“The findings relate to allegations related to 2015 and 2017 that were first received by the WHO investigative team in 2018,” said WHO spokeswoman Marsha Poole.
“His name has been entered into the UN Clearcheck screening database in accordance with due process and to prevent the hiring or re-employment of the perpetrator by UN agencies,” Poole added.
The WHO did not provide details of the allegations of wrongdoing.It also did not confirm why it had only now confirmed its 2022 dismissal or whether it had been investigated before or after Ben Embalek led the COVID-19 investigation. It also did not disclose whether.
Ben Embarek told Reuters that the 2017 incident was “immediately resolved in an amicable manner”, noting that he has challenged the accusations and challenged the sanctions.
He said he could not comment further because a confidentiality agreement binds him and the WHO until a resolution is reached.
“I am not aware of any other complaints, nor have any other complaints been brought to my attention,” Ben Embarek told Reuters. I have high hopes for defending my rights.”
In January 2021, one year after the first COVID-19 outbreak, WHO sent an international team of interdisciplinary scientists and doctors to Wuhan to work with Chinese experts to examine evidence about the virus. .
The Phase 1 investigation yielded reports that only raised more questions about the hypothesis that the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was tinkering with bat coronaviruses. was also criticized for ignoring the Chinese Communist regime’s failure to hand over complete original data and samples.
In response to these concerns, WHO has announced a larger Phase 2 research plan in July 2021. Specifically, more data on Wuhan’s “relevant laboratories and research institutes,” and the city’s live animals in late 2019, to better understand whether the pandemic likely started. We committed to finding and reviewing data on wild animals sold on the market, from human contact with infected animals, or from laboratory escapes.
The proposed second stage probe did not materialize. However, the lab violation hypothesis has recently gained new support after the U.S. Department of Energy and the FBI previously said from neutral positions that the virus was not due to spontaneous mutation and likely originated in a laboratory. I’m getting
Ben Embarek’s dismissal also came when Jeremy Farrar, director of the British Pharmaceutical Trust, who was involved in producing a paper against the laboratory’s leak hypothesis, took over the helm of WHO’s scientific arm. rice field.
According to the email I received, announced Pfarrer was working on a draft paper with Dr. Anthony Fauci, who headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as early as January 2020, after independent journalist James Tobias went through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
At one point, Farrar and Fauci found it “impossible to approve or disprove” that the virus could have been introduced into a “continuous passage” between animals in laboratory experiments and then escaped. seemed to agree. Other scientists behind the paper, including lead author Christian Andersen, also said in an email exchange that the virus did not appear to have occurred naturally.
“I don’t understand how this is achieved in nature…it’s amazing,” Farrar quotes co-author Robert Garry.
“The fact that Wuhan has become the epicenter of the ongoing epidemic caused by nCoV [novel coronavirus] It may be an unfortunate coincidence, but the question immediately arises that it is wrong to dismiss it,” Andersen wrote. However, the scientific evidence is not conclusive enough to give high confidence to any of the three main theories considered.
The paper entitled “Proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” was published in Nature Medicine in March 2020. Government officials, including Fauci, have widely cited the paper and the mainstream media as the scientific basis for dismissing the possibility of COVID-19. I just got out of the lab.
The WHO announced last December that Farrar would take up the post in the second quarter of 2023.
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