Lesley Stahl Grills Member of WHO Team on China’s Denial of Wuhan Lab Theory: ‘You’re Just Taking Their Word For It?’

An expert who participated in the World Health Organization’s probe of the origins of Covid-19 told 60 Minutes that investigators took the word of Chinese scientists who denied the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab.

Peter Daszak, a member of the WHO team and an expert on viral outbreaks and how diseases jump from animals to humans, explained to Lesley Stahl the most likely origin of the virus was a pathway from bats to humans, through a Chinese wet market.

“The theory is that somehow that virus got from a bat into one of these wildlife farms. And then the animals were shipped into the market. And they contaminated people while they were handling them,” he said.

“Something like 75% of emerging diseases come from animals into people. We’ve seen it before. We’ve seen it in China with SARS.”

The World Health Organization report, which leaked on Monday, found the theory that Sars-Cov-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as possible, but “extremely unlikely.”

The theory that the virus leaked from a lab has been disputed by many experts, but was recently embraced by former virologist Robert Redfield, who was director of the CDC when Covid-19 erupted into a pandemic.

Daszak said his fellow investigators questioned lab scientists and were reassured that the lab was audited annually and after the outbreak, and nothing was found.

“But you’re just taking their word for it?” Stahl asked.

“Well, what else can we do?” Daszak replied.

“There’s a limit to what you can do and we went right up to that limit. We asked them tough questions. They weren’t vetted in advance. And the answers they gave, we found to be believable — correct and convincing,” he said.

“We didn’t see any evidence of any false reporting or cover-up in the work that we did in China,” Daszak added.

60 Minutes treated the findings of the WHO report skeptically. Stahl noted that before the WHO team of international experts arrived in Wuhan, China had already concluded that the virus did not leak from a lab.

Lesley Stahl spoke to Jamie Metzle, an NSC official in the Clinton administration, who said he wouldn’t call the WHO team’s undertaking an “investigation,” given China conducted most of the primary investigation.

“It’s essentially a highly chaperoned, highly curated study tour,” Metzle said. “Everybody around the world is imagining this is some kind of full investigation. It’s not. This group of experts only saw what the Chinese government wanted them to see.”

Metzle added that in most cases, China would be conducting the primary investigation, and sharing its findings with the WHO experts.

“You’re saying that China did the investigation, and showed the results to the committee, and that was it?” Stahl asked.

“Pretty much that was it. Not entirely, but pretty much that was it,” Metzle said. “Imagine if we had asked the Soviet Union to do a co-investigation of Chernobyl? It doesn’t really make sense.”

Watch above, via CBS News.