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WHO report on Covid origins faces bipartisan US criticism as lab-leaked virus theory gains credibility

“Since the initial outbreak of COVID-19, the Chinese Communist Party has lied and covered up to the world the pandemic’s origins,” said Rep. Lee Zeldin.

By Josh Plank, World Israel News

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) report on the origins of COVID-19 has provoked bipartisan criticism and accusations of bias since the report’s conclusions were made public by The Associated Press on Monday.

The report says that transmission of the virus from bats to humans through another animal is the most likely origin of the virus, while the virus escaping from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is considered “extremely unlikely.”

“A thorough and truly independent investigation is long overdue,” Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) tweeted Monday.

“Since the initial outbreak of COVID-19, the Chinese Communist Party has lied and covered up to the world the pandemic’s origins. The World Health Organization has played along time and again as the CCP’s useful idiots,” said Zeldin.

Jamie Metzl, former Deputy Staff Director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under then Senator Joe Biden and former member of the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, called the WHO’s report an “insult.”

“It isn’t just inadequate, it’s an insult to everyone victimized by this terrible pandemic,” Metzl tweeted Monday.

Metzl accused the joint WHO-China team of “bending over backwards to validate the zoonosis theory while not even bothering to examine the highly credible lab leak hypothesis.”

Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told CNN on Sunday that he believes the virus came from the Wuhan lab.

“I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory — you know, escaped,” said Redfield.

“Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out,” he said.

David Asher, who headed the State Department’s task force investigating the origins of the coronavirus, believes the virus may have originated from a classified biological weapons program at the Wuhan lab.

“If you believe, as I do, that this might have been a weapons vector gone awry, not deliberately released but in development and then somehow leaked, this has turned out to be the greatest weapon in history,” said Asher during a March 12 panel discussion at the Hudson Institute.

“You’ve taken out 15% to 20% of global GDP. You’ve killed millions of people. The Chinese population has been barely affected. Their economy has roared back to be number one in the entire G20,” he said.

In a New York Post op-ed on Saturday, Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, wrote that there is a “growing body of evidence” suggesting that the coronavirus outbreak did in fact originate from the Wuhan lab.

According to Mosher, the key pieces of evidence are that China does have a bioweapons program, the Wuhan lab was engaged in such bioweapons research, and the novel coronavirus did not come from nature.

“China has engaged in a massive cover-up these past 15 months, and it has not been alone. Officials at the World Health Organization have consistently downplayed the possibility that it came from the lab,” said Mosher.