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Third of Team Appointed by WHO to Investigate Origins of Covid Have Conflicts of Interest

by Toby Young
17 October 2021 10:03 AM

The World Health Organisation is embroiled in a new scandal: at least a third of its team investigating the origins of COVID-19, appointed last week, have conflicts of interest due to research links or previous statements about the disease. Ian Birrell in the Mail on Sunday has more.

The team of 26 scientists, selected from 700 applicants, were named last week after the UN body had its initial efforts frustrated by China and was then widely criticised after they declared it “extremely unlikely” that the pandemic began with a laboratory leak.

Michael Ryan, a senior WHO official, said the new Scientific Advisory Group on the Origins of Novel Pathogens (Sago) had possibly the last chance to discover the origins of Covid-19 “in a collegiate, collective and mutually responsible way”.

Yet there is growing dismay over the inclusion of seven members of the discredited previous group, whose findings echoed the Beijing regime’s line – alongside others who have dismissed fears of a lab incident as conspiracy theory.

Tory MP Bob Seely, of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said: “Why does the new team include people who are compromised? Two whitewashes are not better than one. The world is owed a robust independent inquiry.”

The seven members of the previous study group include British professor John Watson and Dutch scientist Marion Koopmans.

Koopmans runs a viroscience department collaborating with EcoHealth Alliance, the US organisation headed by British scientist Peter Daszak, which funded high-risk bat-virus experiments in Wuhan.

She has published 27 papers with her colleague Ron Fouchier, one of the world’s most controversial researchers into ‘gain of function’ experiments, which aim to make animal viruses more transmissible and able to infect humans.

New members of the WHO team include German virologist Christian Drosten, who signed an influential Lancet statement last year that attacked “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin” and praised Beijing’s “rapid, open and transparent sharing of data”.

One of the two biosafety specialists is Kathrin Summermatter, a Swiss scientist who has praised the security of Chinese labs and said the idea of a research incident is “a classic conspiracy theory”.

Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert at King’s College London, has insisted that it is vital to keep all theories open, and said: “There appear to be many in the group who do not have an open mind – an essential quality in any scientific investigative team.”

You can read the story in the Mail on Sunday here.

Tags: Covid originsLab Leak TheoryWHO

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32 Comments
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EppingBlogger
EppingBlogger
1 year ago

Why are we not surprised. After 13 years of useless Tory government this is what the civil service stands for.

230
-7
Marque1
Marque1
1 year ago
Reply to  EppingBlogger

And how many years of useless, bigoted Labour government before that?

169
0
Free Lemming
Free Lemming
1 year ago
Reply to  EppingBlogger

Conservative = Labour = The Political Class. Left and right wing now only exist in the minds of the populace. The entire system has shifted aggressively to the left. Far left actually. Communism is but a stones throw away. A theory that this article supports.

132
0
Smudger
Smudger
1 year ago
Reply to  Free Lemming

Welcome to the new Lebanon by the Atlantic.

19
0
Grim Ace
Grim Ace
1 year ago
Reply to  EppingBlogger

50 plus years of leftist undermining has led to this. Not just the last tory government. This has been a sustained attack on the west. I blame the soviets: they instigated a disinformation and propaganda warfare campaign against the west from the 1930s onwards. Although the USSR has fallen, the virus they injected (metaphorically) into the west has spread and metastasised. It is powerful against weak and uninformed minds. There are also many neo communists in western institutions, media and the establishment. It has almost become the accepted norm that socialism is the only sensible way to order a society. The soviets have actually won the cold war. Fighting back would take similar decades. The only rapid solution is civil war, or major disorder that governments could not resist. Unfortunately.

Last edited 1 year ago by Grim Ace
44
-1
Smudger
Smudger
1 year ago
Reply to  Grim Ace

“It is powerful against weak and uninformed minds”. Yes, Britain’s swathes of professional and managerial classes have sucked it up haven’t they?

Last edited 1 year ago by Smudger
14
0
RTSC
RTSC
1 year ago

“Find other ways to suppress them” The Nazis used Concentration Camps. The Soviets used the Gulag. Is that the kind of suppression our “politically impartial” Civil Service has in mind?

213
-2
Jon Garvey
Jon Garvey
1 year ago
Reply to  RTSC

The Americans use solitary confinement for those they wish to define as insurrectionists for political gain. The Brits use it for Julian Assange. So I take your question as purely rhetorical, because the cards are already on the table.

82
-2
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
1 year ago

Oh there’s no misunderstanding- they know exactly what they are doing

166
-1
lymeswold
lymeswold
1 year ago

Thank you for a good, if deeply depressing, article.

By the way, this YT channel … https://www.youtube.com/@Travelingisraelinfo … from an Israeli tour guide, has some well-argued pro-Israel material … not that facts, logic or commonsense figure in anti-Israel rhetoric.

56
-6
Grim Ace
Grim Ace
1 year ago
Reply to  lymeswold

Concur about this YouTube channel. He’s an interesting guy. His observations about our religion of love and peace friends, is well observed.

7
0
Jane G
Jane G
1 year ago

I think this has to be one of the most worrying things I have ever read on DS.
What is it called when an organism starts attacking it’s own parts? It boils my you-know-what that my taxes go towards paying these traitors.

161
-2
huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
1 year ago
Reply to  Jane G

“Facilitating this relatively new three-day course were senior lecturers from the Security Studies Department.”

The evidence presented indicates to me that the WEF or subsidiaries therof have infiltrated the Security Studies Department. In the Civil Service attitudes and strategies are all top-down so crap logic at the top soon infects those at the bottom. Those tiddlers swimming in the middle soon get the message for fear of losing their spot on the greasy pole.

I know, I was in it.

130
-1
Mogwai
Mogwai
1 year ago

This must be heartening to know if you’re a parent in the UK. That the authorities could not give a rat’s arse about determining the legit age of migrants before putting full-grown, beardy men in a secondary school, all because they identify as a child. So they’re presumably very up on doing background, CRB checks for teaching staff applicants but this pretense at ‘child safe-guarding’ ends when a migrant 30 odd year old man wants to pretend he’s a teenager. So I guess he’s whatever age he says he is then!

I know Tommy Robinson has been reporting on this and has videos on Rumble, talking to concerned parents and school kids because 13yr old girls are being approached by men posing as school kids and being sexually inappropriate, but all is enabled by sackless school staff. Why/how in the world is this allowed to happen?? Yet one more example of adults in a position of responsibility failing kids miserably.

”Half of all asylum seekers who claimed to be children in Britain since 2020 have turned out to be adults, with dozens even being above the age of thirty.
The practice of migrants claiming to be children, which increases their chances of the UK government granting them asylum in Britain, has increased to such a level that 45 per cent of the 8,766 migrants who claimed to be “kids” were reality adults, equating to 3,944 cases.

According to information from the Migration Watch UK reported by The Sun, there were 1,582 cases of migrants fraudulently claiming to be children in 2022, compared to 227 a decade prior. The think tank went on to reveal that 887 asylum seekers, at least 52 of whom were older than 30, falsely told border officials that they were children between January and September of last year.

The most prevalent country of origin for the fraudster migrants was Afghanistan with 1,361 cases, followed by Iran with 612, and Sudan with 550.
Migration Watch chairman Alp Mehmet told the paper: “That so many still go for this ruse, even when they obviously look much older, tells me it’s a deception that often works.”
The issue of asylum seekers posing as children has been longstanding in Britain, with minors being afforded increased welfare and protections compared to adult migrants and increased chances of being granted the right to remain in the country.”

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/01/09/nearly-half-of-uk-asylum-seekers-who-claim-to-be-children-are-adults-with-4000-cases-since-2020/

74
-1
NeilofWatford
NeilofWatford
1 year ago

Well done for standing up to it.
Direct democracy, direct action is the way forward, as modelled by the severing of speed cams.
They don’t like it up ’em Capt Mainwairing.

47
0
JXB
JXB
1 year ago

Terrorism is a strategy (usually by minority extreme groups) of using spectacular acts of violence or threat thereof, to frighten, panic, destabilise civil society so that it pressurises its Government to give in to the demands of the group.

I thought the definition was well known.

Terrorism can also be a strategy of Governments to pacify and force compliance of the population by instilling fear, uncertainty, threats, coercive power – eg CoVid scamdemic.

62
0
Adrisha
Adrisha
1 year ago

What a terrifying article, thank goodness it’s been written and appears here.

38
0
Mathison
Mathison
1 year ago
Reply to  Adrisha

It’s a dreadful article and badly written by someone unable to join the dots.

1
-10
The Real Engineer
The Real Engineer
1 year ago
Reply to  Mathison

What do you think is wrong with it? To what dots are you referring? I think the happening here (at our expense) shows that the CS is totally out of control, it is acting against its own supposed principles. We know that “education” is now ruined with nonsense, it is time for severe action against all these leftie idiots. Have you spoken to any recent graduate, they are basicly ignorant of everything that underpins all society. Their subject knowledge is also abysmal, but that is because the whole time is spent being indoctrinated!

13
0
varmint
varmint
1 year ago

I knew people could Sleepwalk. —Apparently my dad used to walk about in the middle of the night in his sleep. —But I did not know a whole continent could Sleepwalk. ——That is exactly what Europe is doing. The Liberal Progressive mentality thinks it can socially engineer all crime away. ——How is that working out? –Not so good is it?

Last edited 1 year ago by varmint
42
0
lymeswold
lymeswold
1 year ago

I see this article is now pinned to the top of zerohedge.com … over 500 comments so far … gaining traction.

20
0
Grim Ace
Grim Ace
1 year ago

The civil service is now an enemy of the people. These augian stables neednto be cleaned

When the islamists make their move, and the great civil war breaks out, the civil service traitors (and, it seems, shockingly, RUSI faculty) will suddenly be faced with reality as it smashes them hard in the face.
I shall not be putting out my hand to help anyone in the establishment that calls for assistance. I shall stand on the side of the righteous and fight for and with my people.

Last edited 1 year ago by Grim Ace
33
0
Corky Ringspot
Corky Ringspot
1 year ago

Spent a while reading this sentence before realising there maybe should be a break such as a dash or semicolon after “oppressed”:

“Thus, the Palestinians are inherently oppressed an axiom that fuels the view that Israel is a terrorist state and Hamas’s atrocities are justifiably ‘contextualised’.”

Good article though, despite its depressing message.

2
-1
Mathison
Mathison
1 year ago

It’s bad enough Stanly considers it provocative to question that the pursuit of terrorists can lead to the infringement on civil liberties – has she not heard of Edward Snowden? Yet with witless irony, Stanley considers others naive and uninformed, yet falls for the 70% of terrorism is Islamic trope. Operation Gladio anyone? And how is it she can prove ‘anal rape’ (while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’) when Haaretz and the Times of Israel cite statements by Israeli Police who found no evidence of rape or when thousands of festival attendees with mobile phone footage posted at https://www.october7.org/post/three-terrorists-aimed-kalashnikovs-at-our-heads-and-told-us-to-get-out – no rape claims. Released hostages say there were put in Hijabs – not raped. Maybe she should connect with former CIA counter-terrorism expert Larry Johnson who will tell her that of the 1,129 (on the official Israel ONS equivalent website), 695 were Israeli citizens, 80% of whom were killed by Israeli Security services. By the sounds of the presentation, Anna Stanley may no longer be perfect recruitment material for the civil service counter-terrorism unit – naive, racist and wholly unable to join up the dots. No surprise she sits so comfortably here at the Daily ‘Sceptic’.

3
-16

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