The scientist who led a United Nations health agency delegation to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic in China two years ago has been fired over allegations of sexual misconduct, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday. .
“Peter Ben Embarek was dismissed after findings of sexual misconduct (…) after the corresponding disciplinary process, indicated the WHO spokesperson, Marcia Poole. The findings relate to allegations (of violations) in 2015 and 2017, first received by the WHO investigative team in 2018.
Ben Embarek led an international team from WHO that traveled to China in early 2021, visited the Huanan market in Wuhan (the city where the first human cases were detected) and worked with Chinese scientists to try to identify how the virus spread. spread to people.
The team issued a report indicating that COVID-19 had passed from bats to humans via another animal as the most likely option, considering the idea of escape from a laboratory “extremely unlikely”.
WHO officials, including WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, have since said the origin remains unclear and a laboratory leak cannot be ruled out.
Ben Embarek, a Danish expert on the transmission of diseases from animals to humans, told a television program that he had reservations about a Chinese laboratory located near the market.
The WHO maintains that it has made an effort to eliminate sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse in the organization since the first reports of the abuse of dozens of women during an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo were documented in 2020.
Then more than 80 WHO workers and their collaborators were accused of raping women and girls, demanding sex in exchange for jobs and forcing some victims to abort, in the biggest known sexual assault scandal in the history of the health agency. of United Nations.
