The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) issued a statement this week pressuring China to “share data and access” to help investigate the origin of the coronavirus pandemic, which began in the central Chinese city of Wuhan five years ago.
The W.H.O. statement marked the five-year anniversary of the United Nations agency receiving notifications that Wuhan was besieged by a wave of cases of viral pneumonia, which was ultimately deemed to be caused by a never-before-seen coronavirus later named SARS-CoV-2; the W.H.O. named the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 “COVID-19.” The virus would go on to kill over seven million people in the next five years and infect millions more, significantly handicapping the healthcare systems of a long list of countries including the United States.
In addition to the direct health damage caused by the virus, many international governments – including in America – responded to the spread of a novel disease by severely limiting the civil rights of its citizens, banning many from leaving their homes for extended periods of time and forcing people to cover their faces once they were allowed out of the home. In countries such as Australia, citizens suspected of carrying the virus were hastily imprisoned in quarantine camps, while nations like Canada prosecuted people of faith who dared to hold religious services.
China, a genocidal communist state, enacted arguably the most brutal human rights abuses against its people in the name of containing the virus: a strategy known as “zero-Covid” in which millions of people in the country’s largest cities were abruptly placed under house arrest, leaving citizens to starve and die without necessary medical attention.
Five years later, the W.H.O. and other international public health experts do not have a clear explanation for where SARS-CoV-2 originated and how it spread so rapidly. Documents obtained by the South China Morning Post in March 2020 indicated that the first confirmed case of human infection with SARS-CoV-2 was confirmed in Wuhan, China, on November 17, 2019 – but the Chinese Communist Party insists, without evidence, that the virus originated in America. The W.H.O. conducted an investigation into the origins of the virus in Wuhan in 2021 that offered no clarity on the situation, testing 80,000 animals in the wild and not finding a single carrier of the virus to substantiate the theory that animal-to-human transition was responsible.
The W.H.O., which has faced years of global condemnation for its poor handling of the pandemic, defended itself in a statement marking five years since the first emergency alert tied to the Wuhan coronavirus on December 30.
“At WHO, we went to work immediately as the new year dawned. WHO employees activated emergency systems on 1 January 2020, and informed the world on 4 January,” it claimed. “By 9-12 January, WHO had published its first set of comprehensive guidance for countries, and on 13 January, we brought together partners to publish the blueprint of the first SARS-CoV-2 laboratory test.”
The U.N. agency used the statement to demand that communist China offer more help in investigating the origins of the novel virus.
“We continue to call on China to share data and access so we can understand the origins of COVID-19,” the statement read. “This is a moral and scientific imperative. Without transparency, sharing, and cooperation among countries, the world cannot adequately prevent and prepare for future epidemics and pandemics.”
Omitted from the W.H.O.’s self-congratulatory retrospective on its handling of the virus was the fact that it disregarded warnings from the government of Taiwan in late December 2019 that an infectious disease was spreading in Wuhan, in large part because, due to pressure from China, the W.H.O. does not allow Taiwan’s government to participate in its activities. China falsely claims Taiwan, a separate sovereign nation, as a “province” with a “separatist” movement at the helm, a falsehood the W.H.O. upholds.
The Taiwanese government published a message in April 2020 that it had sent to the W.H.O. leadership in December 2019, reading in part: “News resources today indicate that at least seven atypical pneumonia cases were reported in Wuhan, CHINA … the samples are still under examination, and cases have been isolated for treatment.”
“Taiwan did report our concern on the severity of coronavirus last December to the WHO,” the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) in the United States told Breitbart News in March 2020.“But as a rule, our reporting is always a one-way street. WHO mostly ignored our messages and never shared information as they do to other countries.”
Despite Taiwanese officials warning that coronavirus patients were being isolated, suggesting the disease was contagious, the W.H.O. claimed on January 14, 2020 that “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” had surfaced yet.
The origin of SARS-CoV-2 remains a mystery in 2025. The W.H.O. sent its experts to Wuhan in 2021, a year after China admitted to destroying early samples of the virus by “disinfecting” relevant sites, to investigate where the virus emerged, yielding no significant results. The ultimate W.H.O. report on the origins of the virus claimed that the most likely explanation was that a third-party animal infected humans after the virus emerged in an initial species, but W.H.O. scientists admitted they tested 80,000 animal samples and could not find a single animal in the area testing positive for the virus. The report also sternly dismissed the theory that the virus had originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, known to be studying coronaviruses at the time of the onset of the pandemic, as “extremely unlikely,” without further explanation.”
W.H.O. Secretary-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus condemned his own agency’s report as insufficient.
“I do not believe that this assessment was extensive enough,” he said in March 2021. “Further data and studies will be needed to reach more robust conclusions. Although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation.”
The renewed pressure on China this week arrives shortly before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, who was in charge of the American government in the first year of the pandemic. Trump withdrew America, its largest donor, from the W.H.O. in July 2020 in response to its poor handling of the pandemic and multiple reports indicate that doing so again, undoing outgoing President Joe Biden’s decision to return to the public health body, is on his list of first-day agenda items.
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