A top World Health Organization (WHO) scientist who led an international mission to Wuhan, China, two years ago to investigate the origins of COVID-19 has been fired over alleged sexual misconduct.
“The findings concern allegations relating to 2015 and 2017 that were first received by the WHO investigations team in 2018,” said WHO spokeswoman Marcia Poole.
“Due process was followed, and his name was entered into the U.N. ClearCheck screening database to prevent the hiring or re-hiring of perpetrators by U.N. agencies,” Poole added.
The WHO did not provide further details of the misconduct allegations. Nor did the agency clarify why it only confirmed the 2022 firing now or whether the allegations were being investigated before or after Ben Embarek was tapped to lead the COVID-19 probe.
Ben Embarek told Reuters the 2017 incident “was settled immediately in a friendly way,” noting that he contested the accusations and was challenging the sanctions.
He said he is unable to comment further because confidentiality agreements bind him and the WHO until a resolution is reached.
“I am not aware of any other complaints, and no other complaints have ever been brought to my attention,” Ben Embarek told Reuters. “I duly contest the qualification of harassment, and I am quite hopeful in the defense of my rights.”
In January 2021, a year after the initial COVID-19 outbreak, the WHO dispatched an international team of scientists and doctors from various disciplines to Wuhan, where they worked with Chinese experts to examine the evidence about the virus.
The phase one investigation yielded a report that only spawned more questions over the hypothesis that the virus might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was tinkering with bat coronaviruses. The mission was also criticized for ignoring the Chinese communist regime’s failure to hand over complete, original data and samples.
In response to those concerns, WHO in July 2021 announced a plan for a more extensive second phase of investigation. Specifically, it promised to find and review more data on “relevant laboratories and research institutions” in Wuhan, as well as data on wild animals sold at the city’s live animal markets in late 2019, to better understand whether it’s more likely that the pandemic began with human contact with an infected animal, or from a lab escape.
Ben Embarek’s firing also came as Jeremy Farrar, a British pharmaceutical trust director involved in producing a paper arguing against the lab breach hypothesis, is set to take the helm of WHO’s science division.
At one point, Farrar and Fauci appeared to agree that it’s “impossible to approve or disprove” that the virus could have been put in a “serial passage” between animals in lab experiments and then escaped. Other scientists behind the paper, including leading author Kristian Andersen, also said in email exchanges that the virus appeared not to have naturally emerged.
“I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. ... it’s stunning,” Farrar quoted co-author Robert Garry saying.
“The fact that Wuhan became the epicenter of the ongoing epidemic caused by nCoV [novel coronavirus] is likely an unfortunate coincidence, but it raises questions that would be wrong to dismiss out of hand,” Andersen wrote. “Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are at a crossroads where the scientific evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered.”
The paper titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” was published in Nature Medicine in March 2020. Government officials have widely cited it—Fauci included—and mainstream media outlets as the scientific basis for dismissing the possibility that COVID-19 might have come out of a lab.
The WHO announced last December that Farrar would assume his post in the second quarter of 2023.
