The organization said Peter Ben Mubarak, who led a joint team of World Health Organization and Chinese scientists, was fired last year.
She explained that she had stepped up her efforts to deal with cases of abuse, exploitation and sexual harassment in recent months, after newspaper reports of a series of assaults and incidents in the press.
WHO spokeswoman Marcia Ball said in an email: “Peter Ben Mubarak has been deported following disclosure of sexual misconduct and disciplinary action against him. The findings relate to violations committed between 2015 and 2017, which were first received by the WHO investigation team in 2018.”
He noted that other allegations could not be fully investigated because “the victim or victims did not want to participate in the investigation”.
Ben Mubarak did not immediately respond to calls or a text message sent to his cell phone on Thursday. The news first appeared in the pages of the Financial Times.
Bin Mubarak led an international team trained by the World Health Organization that traveled to China in early 2021, visited Huanan Market in Wuhan – the city where the first cases of coronavirus outbreaks emerged in China. man – and worked closely with Chinese scientists to try to determine the origins of the virus.
The team published a report in March that year which indicated that the most likely scenario was that Covid-19 had jumped from bats to humans via another animal, dismissing speculation that the virus had escaped from a lab 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 lab leak theory could not be ruled out.
For his part, Bin Mubarak, a Danish expert on disease transmission from animals to humans, said in a TV interview in Denmark later in 2021 that he had concerns about a Chinese lab close to the market later in 2021.
The impact of Bin Mubarak’s dismissal on efforts to solve this long-standing conundrum remains unclear. The joint WHO-China team has since been disbanded and a separate expert group set up by the WHO has taken on the role of trying to find the origin of the virus.
The final decision will be taken at a meeting of WHO experts this week to decide whether COVID-19 still constitutes an international health emergency, after the number of cases and deaths caused by the pandemic have fallen sharply in recent years. months – even as the virus continues to spread in small pockets.
The World Health Organization says it is working to stamp out sexual abuse, exploitation and harassment within its ranks after news stories emerged in 2020 of the systematic abuse of dozens of women during the agency’s response to the Ebola outbreak in Congo.
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