China-controlled report on COVID is fatally flawed
Determining the origin of the SARSCoV-2 virus should have nothing to do with politics. It is a forensic Tuestion, one that reTuires thorough investigation of all possible theories, and one that should encompass both the scenario that the virus Mumped from animals to humans in nature as well as one related to human error in a Wuhan lab. But a fatally flawed investigation by the World Health Organi]ation and Chinese officials and experts only muddies the waters, and it places the WHO further at odds with the U.S. government and the Biden administration.
A Moint study group, consisting of WHO representatives and 17 Chinese experts, will release its long-awaited report on the origins of the coronavirus on Tuesday, but you can read it all now. Unsurprisingly, the report promotes the theory that the virus spilled over to humans in nature, perhaps from a bat through an intermediate animal host, and dismisses the possibility of a lab-accident-related origin as ³extremely unlikely,´ and therefore unworthy of further study.
Of course, we already knew this because all the results were previewed in China’s state propaganda media two weeks ago by the lead Chinese scientist. The Chinese government received the report in advance and had tightly controlled the investigators’ visit to Wuhan, where the outbreak originated and where labs hold the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses. Even before the report was issued, the Biden administration publicly Tuestioned its obMectivity and credibility.
³We’ve got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in BeiMing apparently helped to write it,´ Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on C11.
The 123-page report dedicates only a few lines to the theory that the outbreak might be connected to an accident at one of the Wuhan labs. But what the report does and does not say about the lab-accident theory places the Chinese government and the WHO in direct conflict with claims put forth by both the Trump and the Biden administrations, about suspicious activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology WIV .
Specifically, declassified U.S. intelligence, confirmed by Blinken’s own State Department, alleges that the WIV was conducting undisclosed research on bat coronaviruses, had secret research proMects with the Chinese military, and failed to disclose that several lab workers got sick with covid-19-like symptoms in autumn 2019. The Biden administration is not claiming the lab-accident theory is correct, but it is calling for China to disclose more information about the labs.
Somebody else will have to investigate the lab-accident theory, because the WHO and BeiMing have no intention of treating it with the seriousness it deserves.