WHO expert had concerns about lab close to first COVID cases

London, Aug 13 (AP): When a World Health Organization-led team travelled to China earlier this year to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, a top official said he was worried about safety standards at a laboratory close to the seafood market where the first human cases were detected, according to a documentary released by Danish television channel TV2.
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. The WHO report even lent credence to a fringe theory promoted by the Chinese government that the virus may have been spread via frozen seafood packaging.
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. I was a lab technician myself. I’m an immunologist and I have worked in the lab and lab accidents happen, Tedros said. It’s common. In the Danish TV2 documentary, the WHO’s Ben Embarek is pictured arriving in China, inspecting the stalls at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan and examining what he hypothesises might have been living quarters for people who handled live animals there raising the possibility that the virus may have jumped from animals to people at the market. It would mean that the contact between the human beings and whatever may have been in the market i.e. virus and maybe live animals would have been more intense, Ben Embarek said. It goes without saying that the close contact would be doubled many times between humans and animals if you are among them around the clock.
Scientists have previously thought that because many of the earliest known human cases at Wuhan’s Huanan market appeared to have no prior connection to each other, the market might have simply been the place where cases were amplified, not where the virus first breached the species barrier.
The Danish documentary also 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. While numerous experts have questioned whether there might have been a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology where scientists were studying coronaviruses there has been less interest in another nearby facility.
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 meters (547 yards) away from the Huanan market.