(LifeSiteNews) – The incoming chief scientist of the World Health Organization (WHO) helped organize, along with Anthony Fauci, pushback against the plausible theory that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.
Jeremy Farrar is also a staunch supporter of strict lockdowns. He reportedly quit the United Kingdom’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies because it would not embrace his stricter lockdown plan.
WHO announced Tuesday that Farrar, who is currently Director of Wellcome Trust, will become the pro-abortion United Nations entity’s new Chief Scientist “in the second quarter of 2023.”
The appointment set off criticism from some who pointed out Farrar’s efforts, coordinated with Fauci, to suppress the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“In the early weeks of the pandemic Farrar, a former professor of tropical medicine at the University of Oxford, wrote on Twitter, ‘China is setting a new standard for outbreak response and deserves all our thanks,’” Unherd journalist Rob Lownie wrote.
He wrote further:
In February 2020 he was one of 27 scientists to publish a statement condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin..” A paper in Nature Medicine, written by a group of professionals Farrar had helped to convene, concluded: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
The referenced Lancet letter was organized by Peter Daszak, who, as leader of EcoHealth Alliance worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a fact not disclosed in the statement. Only later did the Lancet include a disclosure from Daszak.
Farrar’s appointment comes just days after new emails were released which further tie together Farrar and Fauci.
City Journal reported on December 4:
The scientists who assured the world that the Covid-19 virus could not have been engineered in a laboratory based their pivotal decision on a single piece of flawed evidence. Their discussion of the scientific facts was interspersed with frequent speculation about the public impact of their findings. Theirs was no openminded search for the truth; one scientist expressed his determination from the start to disprove the possibility of a lab leak. In the rush to publish their predetermined conclusion, they ignored a critical viral feature that points to manipulation.
“The new emails date from the first nine days of February 2020. They record the participants’ discussions of how to frame a report discrediting the idea that the Covid virus, SARS-CoV2, could have escaped from a lab,” City Journal reported. “Just such a proposal had been outlined by the American virologists in a January 31 email to Fauci. Strangely, two of the American group soon began to lead the charge against their own proposal.”
“Their efforts led to preparation of an article, overseen by Farrar, Fauci, and [former National Institutes of Health’s Francis Collins], in which the American virologists reversed themselves entirely, declaring it impossible that the virus could have been engineered,” City Journal reported.
That article became the March 2020 Nature Medicine report referenced above.