Is there anyone that didn’t see this coming? It turns out the WHO trip to China to investigate the origin of the coronavirus pandemic was a big waste of time, though of course China got something out of it. Today even the White House is expressing frustration about the findings and how they were communicated.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement that it is imperative that the report be independent and free from “alteration by the Chinese government”, echoing concerns raised by the administration of former President Donald Trump, who also moved to quit the WHO over the issue…
“Re-engaging the WHO also means holding it to the highest standards,” Sullivan said. “We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the Covid-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them.”…
“It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government,” Sullivan said.
In short, it looks like China is cooking the books. A specific revelation prompted this statement. It turns out China refused to give the WHO team the raw data on the earliest people suspected of having the virus. In fact, the NY Times reports the WHO scientists got into shouting matches with their Chinese counterparts who refused to hand over the data or explain how they gathered it.
The investigators, who recently returned from a fact-finding trip to the Chinese city of Wuhan, said disagreements over patient records and other issues were so tense that they sometimes erupted into shouts among the typically mild-mannered scientists on both sides…
Chinese scientists, after a review of 76,000 records at 233 medical institutions in Wuhan, told the W.H.O. team that they had found 92 individuals who fit that description. The government performed antibody tests on two-thirds of those people and reported that they were not positive for Covid-19. (The other third either died or declined to be tested, the Chinese scientists said.)
The W.H.O. scientists were frustrated by the Chinese government’s reluctance to explain how they had gathered the data, according to interviews with team members…
Chinese officials agreed to look more broadly at samples in Wuhan blood banks in 2019, though they said that they had not yet obtained permission to do so.
That last sentence is key. The Chinese scientists aren’t free to investigate. They are only free to ask for permission from the CCP and the CCP does not want to find any evidence the virus was spreading prior to December 2019. If it did, it would have to admit China was the source of the outbreak and that President Xi Jinping was nowhere close to acting quickly enough to prevent the spread of the virus.
Instead, China is pushing an alternate theory of the virus’ origin, i.e. that the virus arrived in China with frozen foods shipped in from abroad.
Chinese officials urged the W.H.O. team to embrace the government’s narrative about the source of the virus, including the unproven notion that it might have spread to China from abroad, according to several members of the team. The W.H.O. scientists responded that they would refrain from making judgments without data.
“It was my take on the entire mission that it was highly geopolitical,” Dr. Fischer said. “Everybody knows how much pressure there is on China to be open to an investigation and also how much blame there might be associated with this.”
Bottom line: The initial WHO report found nothing useful about the actual origin of the virus but did give in to the Chinese by suggesting that the frozen food transmission theory deserved more study. Even the WHO selected scientists know this was all about politics and they still gave in to China’s bullying. No wonder the Biden White House is upset about this fiasco.