Anthony Ruggiero
The only thing the WHO report accomplishes is showing how the organization was focused on pleasing Beijing. This is an important test for Biden—Xi Jinping will triumph if the WHO report stands
Even the head of the World Health Organization does not trust his own investigators’ report on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. He has every reason to be skeptical: Chinese authorities and the WHO’s credulous investigators arduously avoided a serious examination of the possibility that the virus escaped from a Wuhan laboratory. The report is less a researched conclusion than a collection of opinions of the WHO team filtered through the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Neither the report nor the WHO’s current leadership can advance our paramount concern to prevent another pandemic.
Beijing essentially dictated the conclusions to the WHO when its officials visited China in January and February. At a press conference on Feb. 9 in Beijing at the conclusion of the trip, the WHO and China were on the same page labeling the lab-origin theory as “extremely unlikely” while amplifying the CCP’s claims that the pandemic started outside China. Two days later in Geneva, the WHO director-general said all hypotheses would be investigated. Nonetheless, the final report stuck with Beijing’s preferred line against the lab-origin theory.
The pandemic’s origin in a Chinese lab is not, however, the work of conspiracy theorists; there is a body of circumstantial evidence supporting it. Shi Zhengli, a top scientist who studies coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and is referred to by her colleagues as “bat woman,” in February 2020 wondered if the virus had come from the institute. Shi’s honesty was replaced by Chinese propaganda amplifying various theories that the virus emerged outside of China. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, some of these stories landed in the WHO report.
The WHO team also did not investigate the activities at the Wuhan Institute, preferring instead to believe the answers they received. Peter Daszak, a member of the WHO team, admitted that the WHO team wasn’t focused on whether China covered up the origins of the virus.
Lab accidents happen, including in China in 2004, and American diplomats reported in 2017—2018 that Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists were concerned about “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
The zoonotic origin theory, where humans were infected by bats or bats through an intermediate species, has even less circumstantial evidence. The report notes that more than eighty thousand wildlife, livestock, and poultry samples from thirty-one provinces in China were tested for the virus and all results were negative. Shi originally was confused that a coronavirus outbreak emerged in Wuhan and not the southern, subtropical provinces where she had led China’s coronavirus surveillance efforts.
Therein lies the core problem with the zoonotic theory: how does a virus travel long distances without infecting anyone along the way? The report suggests it could have emerged via frozen food or other means from these southern provinces or outside China. But that seems less believable than a virus escaping from a lab in Wuhan—ground zero for the global pandemic.
The Biden administration is finally realizing that the WHO has spent more time aiding and abetting Beijing than protecting public health. Secretary of State Antony Blinken voiced this frustration last month: “We’ve got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into [the WHO] report, including the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it.”
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, rejected crucial elements of the report during the press conference announcing it. He specifically called for greater access to data and rejected the report’s conclusion that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely.” Tedros flatly said that “all hypotheses remain on the table”. While the director-general deserves some credit for challenging the report, he did not go far enough. He should have put his concerns in writing or held the report until it met appropriate standards.
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