(LifeSiteNews) – Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the recently reelected director-general of the World Health Organization, privately admitted to a senior European politician that the lab leak theory for the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely true, according to The Mail.
A senior government source said Tedros told the politician that a “catastrophic accident” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the likely source of the virus.
The alleged statement contradicts the World Health Organization’s public stance. Tedros, speaking to a group of member states earlier this month, said that World Health Organization (WHO) does “not yet have the answers as to where [the virus] came from or how it entered the human population.” Tedros continued, saying that there is a moral obligation to find the origin of the COVID-19 virus, and that all theories about the origins of the disease should be considered.
A WHO spokesman maintained that “Dr. Tedros has been consistently saying that all hypotheses remain on the table as scientists pursue their work.”
The lab leak theory has been lambasted by mainstream scientists and media outlets as a conspiracy theory and condemned as misinformation. Mainstream media outlets began to give the theory credibility in mid-2021.
Last year, a WHO study was conducted to find the origins of the pandemic. The study was fiercely protested by China, and WHO received criticism from member states for deferring to China throughout the study. The study attempted to dismiss the lab leak theory and did not find anything to “dramatically change the current understanding of the early days of the pandemic.”
A group of Western scientists, called the Paris Group, released a letter in March 2021 that stated “there is as yet no evidence demonstrating a fully natural origin of this virus,” and criticized the investigation as a “compromise” with the Chinese government “based partly on political and other limitations.”
Jamie Metzl, a WHO scientist and an organizer of the Paris Group, told FOX News that COVID-19 could have originated form a lab leak in Wuhan. “[W]hat Wuhan has is China’s only level-four virology institute, the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses,” it “was doing dangerous ‘gain of function’ research with a spotty security record, and we have this massive Chinese cover-up that came afterwards,” Metzl said.
Gain of function research involves strengthening viruses to study their effects. In 2012, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), released a paper that said the risks of studying viruses with gain of function research outweighed the risks of a global pandemic. Fauci has denied that NIAID funded gain of function research at the Wuhan lab with grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in spite of evidence that shows Fauci approved the gain of function grants to the lab in Wuhan.
Internal emails show that Fauci and other scientists had concerns that the gain of function research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology could have played a part in starting the COVID-19 pandemic as early as January 2020. Last July, an Indian political commentator revealed that Fauci might have threatened scientists in the United States and Japan for contradicting his denial of the natural origins of COVID-19.
Last year, a group of scientists testified before a congressional subcommittee that the gain of function research conducted at the Wuhan lab likely played a part in the outbreak of COVID-19.
Tedros has recently pushed for an international treaty to help prevent future pandemics. Experts such as Dr. Robert Malone allege that the treaty is nothing more than a political power grab that would threaten American sovereignty. A LifeSite petition to stop the treaty has more than 97,000 signatures since it was put up last month.