W.H.O. Gives Up on Coronavirus Origins Probe, Blames ‘the Politics’

The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) on Tuesday announced it has suspended its investigations into the origin of the Wuhan coronavirus, ostensibly due to “data collection issues,” but W.H.O. epidemiologist Dr. Maria van Kerkhove admitted it was mostly a matter of the Chinese Communist Party defeating the probe.

“The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins,” said the exasperated van Kerkhove before expressing her “really deep frustration” with China’s refusal to provide vital laboratory data.

“There is no Phase Two,” van Kerkhove told Nature when asked if the W.H.O. investigation might continue in some other form. 

This would leave the deeply flawed and heavily criticized March 2021 report from W.H.O. investigators — after a visit to Wuhan, China, that was tightly controlled by Communist Party officials — as the U.N. health organization’s final word on the origins of the novel coronavirus.

W.H.O. sought to mollify critics in September 2021 by announcing a more thorough coronavirus probe would be organized, with a larger team focused on conclusively determining if Chinese coronavirus was released from the now-infamous virology institute in Wuhan. This would be the “Phase Two” that van Kerkhove pronounced dead on Tuesday.

In the time since the heavily-obstructed W.H.O. visit to Wuhan in 2021, more scientists have proposed a laboratory leak as the most likely origin of the pandemic. In July 2021, W.H.O. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus conceded that his agency had been premature to classify lab leak as unlikely. Tedros criticized the Chinese government for its lack of transparency when making this concession, fairly begging Beijing to cooperate so the theory of laboratory origins could be ruled out.

The UK Telegraph on Tuesday noted that, in addition to the suspicious lack of cooperation from Chinese health officials, another factor in the growing acceptance of the lab leak theory is the remarkable difficulty in finding animals that might have spread the virus to humans. During previous epidemics with zoonotic origins, it took only a matter of months to find the animal transmission culprit.

Meanwhile, steadily more evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was involved in engineering dangerous coronaviruses has leaked out, including at least one WIV researcher admitting that an unpublished experiment with modified SARS-type coronaviruses was conducted.

Rutgers University molecular biologist Prof. Richard Ebright, a determined critic of both the Chinese and American government responses to the pandemic, castigated W.H.O. for “utterly” failing in its responsibility to determine the origins of the Chinese coronavirus.

“It’s fortunate that the U.S. Congress is beginning an investigation of the origin of the pandemic that killed more than 15 million,” Ebright told the Telegraph.

Ebright was referring to the announcement on Monday by Republicans on the House Oversight pandemic subcommittee that a probe would be launched into the origins of the coronavirus and possible complicity by U.S. officials in its creation, notably including Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“The American people deserve real answers after years of suffering through the coronavirus pandemic and related government policies. This investigation must begin with where and how this virus came about so that we can attempt to predict, prepare or prevent it from happening again,” said Select Subcommittee Chair Brad Wenstrup (R-OH).