2023-05-04 11:49:29
The World Health Organization has expelled the scientist who led a high-level delegation from the organization to China two years ago to look into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, citing sexual misconduct.
The organization indicated that Peter Ben Mubarak, who led a joint team of the World Health Organization and Chinese scientists, was dismissed last year.
She explained that she had intensified her efforts to confront cases of abuse, exploitation and sexual harassment in recent months, following newspaper reports on a series of assaults and incidents in the press.
WHO spokeswoman Marcia Ball said in an email: “Peter Ben Mubarak was expelled following the disclosure of sexual misconduct and disciplinary measures once morest him. The findings relate to violations committed between 2015 and 2017, which were first received by the WHO investigation team in 2018.”
It noted that other allegations might not be fully investigated because “the victim(s) did not want to participate in the investigation.”
Ben Mubarak did not immediately respond to calls or a text message sent to his mobile phone on Thursday. The news was first published in the pages of the Financial Times.
Bin Mubarak led an international team formed by the World Health Organization that went to China in early 2021, visited the Huanan Market in Wuhan – the city where the first cases of coronavirus outbreaks appeared among humans – and worked closely with Chinese scientists in an attempt to determine the origins of the virus.
The team issued a report in March of that year that said the most likely scenario was that Covid-19 had passed from bats to humans via another animal, dismissing speculation that the virus had escaped from a laboratory as a “very remote possibility”.
WHO officials, including Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said at the time that the origins of the virus remained unclear and the laboratory leakage theory might not be ruled out.
For his part, Bin Mubarak, a Danish expert on the transmission of diseases from animals to humans, said in a television interview in Denmark later in 2021 that he had concerns regarding a Chinese laboratory close to the market later in 2021.
The impact of Ben Mubarak’s dismissal on efforts to solve this long-running conundrum remains unclear. The WHO-China joint team has since been disbanded, and a separate panel of experts set up by the WHO has taken on the role of trying to find the origin of the virus.
The final decision will be made at a meeting of WHO experts this week to decide whether COVID-19 still constitutes an international health emergency, following the sharp decline in the number of cases and deaths caused by the pandemic in recent months – even as the virus continues to spread in small pockets.
The World Health Organization says it is working to eradicate sexual abuse, exploitation and harassment in its ranks following press reports emerged in 2020 regarding the systematic abuse of dozens of women during the agency’s response to the Ebola outbreak in Congo.
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