For the first time since the coronavirus began ravaging the world in early 2020, China is beginning to sweat.
Joe Biden’s recent call for a thorough intelligence review of what is known of the origins of Covid-19 is only the beginning. Biden wants a report in 90 days on whether or not to give credence to the lab-leak theory. The ramifications for the world are hugely significant. If it can be proven that Covid-19 escaped from a poorly run and maintained Wuhan Institute of Virology, China could be liable for trillions of dollars in damages in international courts. It may also become a pariah nation, being refused membership in international organizations, public and private.
Its credibility and its prestige would be reduced to third-world status. At a time when China is going for the brass ring of world leadership and unquestioned superpower status, discovering that China didn’t do more to stop the spread of the virus when it could have been contained would almost certainly set back those plans.
This is why China has continued the deceptions, evasions, and lies. The stakes are enormous. So it’s not surprising that China would hit back at Biden’s call for a definitive investigation into the origins of the coronavirus.
China on Thursday hit back at President Joe Biden’s call to redouble efforts to determine the origins of the coronavirus, and dismissed a theory that it may have leaked from a laboratory in its city of Wuhan as a “conspiracy.”
Chinese officials accused the U.S. of politicizing the pandemic and said that international experts had “repeatedly praised China’s open and transparent attitude” to Covid-19’s origins.
“Some people in the United States completely ignore facts and science,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters Thursday.
For a minute, I thought he sounded like Anthony Fauci.
“The extremely impossible statement of China’s ‘laboratory leak theory’ has been clearly documented in the report of the WHO Joint Investigation,” Zhao said Thursday.
The WHO “investigation” was so severely impeded by the Chinese Communist government as to make it useless as an “independent” investigation. Basing a denial on a report discredited by dozens of leading scientists and researchers does nothing for China’s credibility.
For Biden, the stakes are just as high. He and the Democrats echoed the Chinese “conspiracy theory” charge last year when Donald Trump first proposed the lab-leak theory. Biden has also rejoined the WHO, despite growing evidence that the world health body is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Communist Chinese.
It now falls to the Biden administration to prove that it has the clout and willingness to track down the origin of the virus. There will be questions whether intelligence agencies, given the notorious difficulty of penetrating the Chinese security state, represent the best way of finding the truth. It is not yet clear whether China fully understands the origin of the virus. And the starting points of pandemics can be difficult to pinpoint.
“Many of us feel that it is more likely that this is a natural occurrence … where it goes from an animal reservoir to a human. But we don’t know 100% the answer to that,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious diseases expert, said at a White House Covid-19 briefing Tuesday.
At this point, Fauci may have reached the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. There are no indications in a close examination of the DNA of the virus that it was fiddled with or was a product of “gain-of-function” research. But the Wuhan lab in question had a miserable safety record, including ill-trained staff and poor record keeping. It is entirely possible that the reason researchers are having a hard time identifying where Covid-19 originated in the wild or a “wet market” is that it didn’t start there. It could very well turn out that some untrained lab tech made a critical error and released the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus by accident.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member