According to a team of 4 WHO experts who were sent to China to investigate the COVID-19’s origin, there is no evidence indicating that the COVID-19 virus was ‘leaked’ in a lab in Wuhan. The expert’s opinions were contrary to many popular conspiracy theories that suggest that the virus was indeed created in a Wuhan lab and leaked by China.

Also read: WHO scientists reach Wuhan to investigate the origin of COVID-19

Wuhan is the capital of the Hubei province. The city is infamous for being the ‘ground-zero’ aka the first place in the world where the COVID-19 virus was detected in 2019. Since its outbreak the virus has taken lives of more than 2.3 million people across the world and has infected over 106 million people.

The experts from WHO spoke in a virtual event and said that the most plausible origin source of the novel coronavirus may have been the unfettered wet market in Wuhan. The experts claimed that they connected a link between the Wuhan wet markets, where the citizens first showed the signs of being infected, and the regions of South China where bats with similar viruses were found.

Dr Peter Daszak, part of the 4-member team that carried out the probe in Wuhan said how “There was a conduit from Wuhan to the provinces in South China, where the closest relative viruses [to the coronavirus] are found in bats.” In a nutshell, the virus could have travelled from the domesticated animals in the country to the Wuhan’s wet markets. Dr Daszak is the President of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organization that conducts researches on human, animal and environmental health, and the links between them. The team also included Professor David Heymann, Professor Marion Koopmans and Professor John Watson.

In the virtual meeting, Dr Daszak also spoke briefly about the political intrigue over the unfounded COVID-19 virus origin and said that the processes related to the investigation s the only way to deal with the special politics.  “This scientific process here — which involves looking at data, analysing it, coming to conclusions about what it means, and making it public — is extremely important because it allows you to do the work irrespective of the politics. There is a purity to this process, and in other scientists reacting to it. I find solace in that,” said Dr Daszak.

Meanwhile, Professor Marion claimed that during their investigation, their 4-member team also visited 3 research laboratories that were close to one of the Wuhan’s wet market, Huanan. After the investigation, Marion was of the opined, “We concluded that it’s extremely unlikely there was a lab incident.”

It should be noted that the 3 laboratories that the scientists visited have been front and center of several COVID-19 origin related conspiracy theories spread around the internet. These 3 laboratories included the much talked about Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of the biggest virus research labs in China.

The conspiracy around the origin was further fueled by the former US President Donald J Trump. On 15 January, Donald Trump issued a statement saying how the US Intelligence Community had found evidences that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were infected with COVID-19-like-symptoms in 2019 autumn.

Trump’s claim was inferred as Chinese government’s effort to hide the outbreak and its effort in conducting secret projects under the labs. Trump had also defunded the National Institutes of Health which was conducting COVID-19 research in collaboration with the Wuhan labs.

For the unimitated, after the COVID-19 pandemic put the world at a halt, various health agencies associated with the United Nations worked for months and sent a team of experts to Wuhan. This team’s main aim was to probe the origin of novel coronavirus and find out how the virus jumped from domesticated animals to wild animals to humans.

Although the outbreak was detected in 2019, the experts could start their probe in January 2021-more than a year after the first cases were registered. This was due to the difficult geopolitical relationship China shares with the world. The experts spent 4 weeks in Wuhan, and concluded their mission.