Six Scientists from First WHO Wuhan Mission Named to New WHO Virus Origins Investigative Group

Marion Koopmans (centre) was part of the WHO mission to Wuhan and has also been selected for its Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO).

 

Link to the source article >> https://healthpolicy-watch.org/who-selects-scientists-to-take-forward-covid-19-origins-research/

The World Health Organization (WHO) has named 26 scientists to a new Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), which will take forward the work of the international expert group that led an initial  mission to Wuhan in January 2021, as well as investigating future pandemics.

Six of the scientists are associated with the original investigative mission to Wuhan.  That includes five of the nine original international team members dispatched to Wuhan: Marion Koopmans, Vladimir Dedkov, John Watson, Thea Fischer, Hung Nguyen.  In addition, Dr Yungui Yang, Deputy Director of the Beijing Institute of Genomics, one of eight Chinese team members, and a group leader of the original mission, also will serve on the new SAGO team.

They are joined by more scientists from the world’s powerhouse nations, including Inger Damon from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a leading Swiss biosafety expert,  Dr Kathrin Summermatter. Five Africans are also part of the new group including Kenya’s Dr Rosemary Sang.

Peter Daszak, the controversial president of the US-based Ecohealth, who had been a prominent member of the first WHO mission, was notably absent from the list.  Pre-pandemic, Ecohealth had supported a series of coronavirus research projects at the Wuhan Institute for Virology (WIV), including what critics say was  “high-risk” collection of such viruses – leading to charges that Daszak had an inherent conflict of interest with an mission supposedly tasked with determining how the virus first leapt to humans – and whether it was the result of a lab biosafety or food systems failure.

That first WHO mission yielded a report that was widely criticized as papering over Chinese data omissions. It also failed to carefully consider the hypotheses that the virus might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that was researching bat coronaviruses – a theory that dozens of experts around the world say remains just as plausible as the theory that the virus escaped somewhere along the food chain – until more evidence is gathered.

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