The Communist Party of China, accused of extensively meddling in ongoing epidemiological investigations into the origin of the Chinese coronavirus, protested on Monday that America is “exerting pressure” on the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) leading to biased scientific findings.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry complained Monday in anticipation of the publication of an extensive report by the W.H.O. detailing the findings of a mission by the United Nations body to Wuhan, China, where the virus originated, early this year. The mission arrived in Wuhan over a year after the Chinese coronavirus pandemic began and a year after Communist Party officials destroyed pivotal evidence regarding where the virus came from, including early samples of the virus from Wuhan. When the Foreign Ministry protested of alleged American meddling in the mission, the full report had not been officially published, but the Associated Press claimed to have access to a leaked copy.
The W.H.O. published the report Tuesday. It concluded that the initial outbreak of Chinese coronavirus among humans preceded the identification of a “patient zero” by several weeks, that the virus may have originated in unnamed “other countries,” and that “a laboratory origin of the pandemic was considered to be extremely unlikely,” despite Wuhan hosting one of the most active virology laboratories known to be studying coronaviruses. The report notably remarked that evidence of the Chinese coronavirus spreading among animals was extremely low, making it impossible for experts to identify an origin species.
The international health agency has faced significant global criticism for allowing half of the team investigating in Wuhan to be government-approved Chinese “experts” and reportedly yielding to the Communist Party’s growing demands for control of the investigation. Beijing claimed the opposite was true — that the investigation was biased by undue pressure from the United States.
“The U.S. kept showing its ‘concerns’ over the report. Is it attempting to exert political pressure on W.H.O. experts?” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian asked during Monday’s regular press briefing. “Please ask the experts which parts of the report the Chinese government helped them to write. Does China’s facilitation on traceability research also a behind-the-scenes manipulation?”
“We never accept the groundless accusations and wanton denigration on the epidemic issue by the US side,” Zhao protested, claiming that China was not the homeland of the pandemic, but merely the first nation to identify the virus.
Zhao pressured the United States to allow a W.H.O. investigation into the origins of the Chinese coronavirus in America, repeating his uncorroborated conspiracy theory that the virus originated with the United States Army.
The state-run Global Times propaganda outlet claimed that an unnamed “Chinese expert” on the W.H.O. team complained that “the Chinese experts noticed palpable ‘political pressure’ from certain foreign countries on the international experts,” referring to the United States.
The W.H.O. report published Tuesday lightly entertained the possibility that “other countries” may have been the original source of the virus, but did not identify any or provide any evidence for this. A leaked Chinese government report identified the first diagnosed case of Chinese coronavirus to have been documented on November 17, 2019, in Wuhan. No evidence exists that any doctor anywhere in the world confirmed a Chinese coronavirus case before this date.
A study published last week by researchers at the University of California San Diego concluded it was “highly probable” the first cases of Chinese coronavirus in humans occurred in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, as early as October 2019.
“By the time Covid-19 [Chinese coronavirus disease] was first identified, the virus had firmly established itself in Wuhan,” the study noted.
China claimed to the W.H.O. to have documented its first case of Chinese coronavirus on December 8, 2019, not the November date listed on the leaked government report.
Tuesday’s report did not shed any significant light on the discussion of when the virus first began infecting humans. It instead focused largely on identifying and assessing various hypotheses for the virus’s origin, concluding that zoonotic transmission was “possible to likely,” transmission through an intermediary host “likely to very likely,” transmission through frozen food “possible,” and transmission through a laboratory incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology “extremely unlikely.” The study did not address the Chinese government conspiracy theory of the virus originating in a U.S. Army facility.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the W.H.O., emphasized in remarks on Tuesday that “all hypotheses are on the table.”
Dominic Dwyer, a member of the W.H.O. investigative team from Australia, said in an interview in February immediately after leaving Wuhan that there was “very limited” evidence suggesting a non-Chinese origin for the virus and that he believed bats to be the origin host species for the virus. He suggested that an intermediate host was the likeliest scenario, the conclusion the official report also reached.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying nonetheless continued to promote the theory Tuesday that the virus originated at Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army facility that has no known links to the pandemic. Beijing has yet to offer any evidence to support its claim, but has instead framed the conspiracy theory as a “big question mark” over America.
“When some on the US side pointed fingers at our laboratory in Wuhan, we openly invited the W.H.O. mission for a visit and provided full cooperation,” Hua told reporters, a claim W.H.O. experts have anonymously debunked in recent reports. “We have also given media access to foreign journalists. But can the US side do the same, and invite international experts and media for a visit in an open and aboveboard manner?”
Hua, unlike Zhao, has publicly speculated that cases of lung injuries caused by Chinese-made e-cigarettes in the United States in 2019 were secretly coronavirus cases, without providing an explanation for how doctors treated lung injuries without any infectious disease protections and did not contract lung injuries themselves; Chinese coronavirus is a highly contagious disease believed to spread through people breathing near each other.