A “shocked” China launched an unprecedented stream of invective against the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) on Thursday after the U.N. subsidiary confirmed it will enact plans to audit Chinese labs as part of further investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
The abuse came as Beijing revealed some five million citizens had signed an open letter demanding the W.H.O. investigate the U.S. Fort Detrick laboratory instead.
As Breitbart News reported, last week the health body announced a fresh international probe into the coronavirus source, amid increasing pressure from critics for an investigation into a biotech lab in Wuhan after the first effort was frustrated by China’s refusal to fully cooperate.
President Joe Biden shut down a State Department probe into the origins of coronavirus in China that was launched by the Trump administration under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as Breitbart News reported.
Last year, concerns voiced by President Donald Trump that COVID-19 might have escaped from the Wuhan lab were dismissed by media fact-checkers as conspiracy theories.
Trump’s doubts about the W.H.O.’s desire to deal with China and its ability to discharge its duties were also publicly expressed but mostly ignored.
Now Trump’s concerns are gaining traction and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has flicked the switch to abuse and said questioning Beijing showed “disrespect” and “arrogance towards science.”
The proposal outlined by W.H.O. chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus included “audits of relevant laboratories and research institutions operating in the area of the initial human cases identified in December 2019” – pointing to the Chinese city of Wuhan.
But China’s vice health minister Zeng Yixin told reporters Thursday he was “extremely surprised” by the plan, the official CCP mouthpiece Global Times reported.
“It is impossible for us to accept such an origin-tracing plan,” he said at a news conference called to address the coronavirus origins issue.
Zeng said he was “shocked” to read the proposal and he could sense the “lack of respect for common sense and the arrogance in the proposal.”
Meanwhile Pompeo added his voice Monday to the criticism of China, telling Breitbart News editor-in-chief Alex Marlow the Biden administration has “literally done nothing” to pressure Beijing to cooperate.
“Don’t forget, that [Wuhan] lab is still open,” Pompeo said. “That lab is still conducting viral research. It won’t surprise me at all if the military is still inside that lab.”
“And this administration has literally done nothing to say, ‘No, you have to, at the very least, shut down the place that it is likely this virus came from,’” the former Secretary of State added.