The Covid-19 Origin Investigation – WSJ

WHO officials privately considered speaking out, but calculated that the Chinese Communist Party would be even less cooperative if criticized in public. The agency’s reluctance did not do much. A team of WHO experts went to Beijing in February 2020 to study the origin of the virus – when the chances of discovering how it is transmitted from humans to humans were significantly better than today – but the Chinese government hindered .

Negotiations with Beijing continued until 2020. This month, dr. Tedros finally gathered the spiritless complaint that he was “very disappointed” about the delays. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said it welcomed the investigators’ presence shortly before they began arriving in recent days. Take it just as seriously as OJ Simpson’s promise to make his ex – wife’s killer ‘my primary purpose in life’.

According to media reports, Beijing has urged the WHO to delegate critical initial investigative work to Chinese scientists. The WHO team will get incomplete data at best, as research on the origins of Covid-19 cannot be published in China without the approval of the Communist Party. The Chinese government also approved the members and agenda of the WTO.

The WHO team has set low expectations for a visit to Wuhan, where investigators hope to interview Chinese scientists and study how the virus spread in humans. The trip would not mean much without comprehensive access to various biological samples in the country. This may indicate how long the virus spread in China before it became a very visible outbreak a year ago.

In his last days as Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo said Washington believes several researchers within the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) ‘became ill in the fall of 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms that consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal diseases. He called on the WHO to investigate WIV’s links with the Chinese military and the investigation into viruses similar to Covid-19.

“It’s not about convicting China or saying ‘It started here, give or take three meters. “It’s about reducing the risk,” a member of the WTO team said recently. Knowing more about the origin of the virus can save lives by preventing future outbreaks and causing even better treatments or vaccines in the current pandemic.

Yet Beijing has shown that its image takes precedence over public health. As some Chinese vaccine results disappoint, state media used social media to cast doubt on Western vaccines. Chinese diplomats have used the openness of countries such as France – which research has shown that the virus circulates earlier than previously believed – to indicate that the virus actually originated elsewhere.

They also drove conspiracy theories about an American origin. “If the United States really respects facts, they should open the biological laboratory in Fort Detrick,” a State Department spokesman said recently. This is an echo of the Cold War: the Soviet Union accused the US of creating HIV in the same place. While evidence points to China, it is possible that the virus made the leap to humans elsewhere. If WHO finds a reason to bring a team to the US, its officials should be welcome to investigate – as long as China provides reciprocal access. We do not hold our breath.

Team Biden has promised that the US will reaffirm the US influence on international organizations such as WHO. But if a U.S. return does not call for a more thorough investigation into the virus – one of the agency’s most important positions, what’s the point of membership exactly?