Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Wednesday criticized the World Health Organization (WHO) for parroting the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) narrative that COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP virus, could not have initially spread from a Wuhan lab.
“Shameful. At the outset of the pandemic, the WHO acted as a propagandist for communist China, echoing the CCP’s lies,” Cruz said in a statement on Twitter. “Now, the WHO concludes that the virus did not accidentally escape from a Wuhan govt lab because ... the CCP told them it didn’t.”
“The laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population,” Embarek said. “Therefore, [it] is not in the hypotheses that we will suggest for future studies.”
Cruz alleged that the WHO assisted the Chinese regime in covering up the start of the Wuhan epidemic toward the end of 2019, which led to a lack of action to prevent international travel out of Wuhan, resulting in a full blown pandemic.
The WHO didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times.
The report by Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said that the CCP engaged in active cover-up efforts of information surrounding the spread of the CCP virus, and the WHO enabled the cover-up by praising the CCP and “parroting” its talking points.
Former President Donald Trump said the WHO failed to investigate credible reports from sources in China’s Wuhan province that conflicted with Beijing’s accounts about the virus’s spread and “parroted and publicly endorsed” the theory that human-to-human transmission was not happening.
Separately, Chinese dissident Yuan Hongbing, an academic and vocal critic of the CCP, condemned the WHO’s findings on the source of the pandemic as “a farce staged by the Chinese regime,” adding that the CCP is likely to leverage them to deflect responsibility for causing the global crisis.
The WHO team has said that it could take years for health experts to fully understand the origins of the CCP virus.