WHO expert in Wuhan says lab leak 'very unlikely' as Covid source

The head of the World Health Organization-led team of experts investigating the origins of Covid-19, Peter Ben Embarek, said on Tuesday that it was “very unlikely” that a leak from a laboratory was the source of the outbreak.

During its investigation in the central Chinese city where the virus first emerged, the team visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the subject of a number of conspiracy theories that claim a lab leak caused the city’s outbreak.

WHO foreign expert Peter Ben Embarek said identifying the animal pathway remains a "work in progress", adding the absence of bats in the Wuhan area dimmed the likelihood of direct transmission.

It was "most likely" to have come from an intermediary species, he said, before backing up China's position that there was no evidence of "large outbreaks in Wuhan" before December when the first official cases have been recorded.

Also read: WHO mission to China fails to find source of coronavirus

Liang Wannian, head of the China side of the joint mission, said animal transmission remained the likely route, but "the reservoir hosts remain to be identified".

Ben Embarek also quashed the theory that a leak from a virology lab in Wuhan could have caused the pandemic.

"The laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely," he said, adding it "is not in the hypotheses that we will suggest for future studies".

The mission was a diplomatically knotty one -- presaged by fears of a whitewash -- with the US demanding a "robust" probe and China firing back with a warning not to "politicise" the investigation.

The WHO experts spent a month in China including two weeks in quarantine.