The epidemiologist and hand-picked team leader for the World Health Organization investigation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that erupted in Wuhan says the Chinese made him dismiss any link to the two coronavirus labs in Wuhan.
The problem with that narrative; China wanted Peter Ben Embarek leading the investigation. He had lived in Beijing for years and was considered an ally of the communist government inside WHO. WHO had already done everything China said to do, including claiming it did not transmit from human to human. They were certainly going to send in the person the Chinese wanted, for no other reason than that if they weren't allowed in at all, countries funding the UN might start to wonder about their lack of utility.
There were always problems with him being involved. He was too close to the Chinese, to be sure, but he is also an epidemiologist. He links X to Y using statistics. A true inquiry would have been led by a virologist without any political affiliations. A critical thinker would have objected to a 9-month delay, scrubbing of the entire Wuhan wet market, removal of the database of 15,000 coronavirus samples, and only being allowed to visit the lab for 4 hours.
Someone doing what they were told would do what he did; dismiss any evidence of a Chinese lab and watch while the Chinese blamed American frozen food.
In a Dutch interview, he later said, "It probably means there's a human error behind such an event, and they're not very happy to admit that. The whole system focuses a lot on being infallible, and everything must be perfect. Somebody could also wish to hide something. Who knows?"
Then he said he did not say that at all, the Dutch don't know how to translate. If he knew as much about Netherlands as he knows about China, he'd know that nearly all of the Dutch are completely fluent in English, they are arguably the most multi-lingual people in the world. Yet they couldn't write down his words from a recording correctly?
This scrambling to deny is evidence that the Chinese did not stop pulling strings at WHO before or after they visited Wuhan, and won't have to stop any time soon.
