WHO Chief: World's 1st Known COVID Patient May Have Been Infected by a Bat While Working in Wuhan Lab

World Health Organization (WHO) chief Peter Embarek admitted that the first COVID patient in the world might have contracted the virus while working with bats at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

The WHO chief revealed that the first case of COVID might have happened while getting samples from bats for research at the said laboratory.

WHO Chief Says World's First COVID Patient Might be a Lab Worker

Peter Embarek told Denmark's television station TV2 that a lab worker instead of a random villager probably got the coronavirus first as lab workers have greater exposure to bats.

"An employee who was infected in the field by taking samples falls under one of the probable hypotheses," said Embarek, who led the WHO probe into the origins of the COVID pandemic in China.

Despite giving the shocking claims, the WHO chief underscored that the investigators from their organization have not yet found direct evidence of the said narrative.

Embarek made the shocking claim after he rejected the idea of the virus escaping from the laboratory. He initially dismissed the notion that the coronavirus escaped from a lab as extremely unlikely.

While still in China on the fact-finding mission, the WHO chief also called on scientists to stop investigating the possibility of the coronavirus escaping from the said laboratory.

WHO Chief Says Wuhan Lab Virus Leak Should be Further Investigated

Peter Embark said the Wuhan Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (WHCDC) lab was more concerning. The WHCDC is just a few hundred yards from the Huanan wet market, where experts say the first cluster of COVID cases was officially reported. It reportedly kept disease-ridden animals in its labs, including some 605 bats.

The market is also only a few miles from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab, where researchers and scientists were reportedly studying and conducting experiments on bats and bat-based coronaviruses similar to COVID before the pandemic started.

Some experts believed that the market might have been simply the area where COVID cases were amplified and not where the coronavirus first breached the species barrier.

When Embarek and his team visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the WHCDC, the WHO chief noted that they were not permitted to look at the laboratory records. He also said the WHCDC lab was moved in December 2019 near the wet market, and the time of its transfer was when the cases started emerging.

"This is the period when it all started, and you know what when you move a laboratory, it is disruptive to everything. You have to move the virus collection, sample collection and other collections from one place to another... So at some point it will also be interesting to look at that period and this laboratory," Embarek noted.

The WHO chief earlier stressed the lack of evidence of transmission of the virus in "Wuhan or elsewhere" before December 2019. But Embarek later backtracked and said his team found at least 13 COVID variants in Wuhan, and about 1,000 individuals in Wuhan might have been infected with the virus in early December.

The presence of these different strains supports some claims that the coronavirus had been in development for some time.

Meanwhile, WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus still acknowledged that it was still "premature" to discard the possibility of a lab leak as the source of COVID. This statement was echoed by Embarek, stressing that there should be further investigations done on the idea.

Apart from the WHO officials, the lab leak theory was also supported by former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield, who believed that the pathogen in Wuhan was from the laboratory that escaped.

The former CDC director said it was not unusual for the lab workers to be infected by respiratory diseases, especially when working on it.

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Written By: Joshua Summers

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