The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Friday abruptly switched from welcoming the impending visit of World Health Organization (W.H.O.) investigators to demanding they send a team to the United States to investigate the “origin” of the Wuhan coronavirus there.
On the same day, the communist regime’s Center for Disease Control repeated its allegations that the recent coronavirus outbreak in Beijing was caused by a tough new mutant strain imported from Europe.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s outburst came after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday predicted the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would prevent W.H.O. investigators from digging up any embarrassing information about the coronavirus when they make their latest visit to China.
“I’ll repeat a theme I’ve been talking about for months: The CCP has an enormous credibility problem. They failed to tell the world the truth about this virus, and now hundreds of thousands of people all across the world are dead,” Pompeo said on Wednesday.
“And they now say they’re going to allow the W.H.O. to come in. That’s great, but the W.H.O. needs to be free to do its real work. We need to make sure the right people are there to engage in this investigation, and we need real answers, not a perfunctory political solution,” he said.
“This is about science, not politics, and the Chinese Communist Party needs to come clean with the world about this virus,” Pompeo said, going on to note that W.H.O. recently revised its official timeline of the pandemic to make it clear China did not provide the timely warning of the outbreak required under W.H.O. regulations.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian shot back on Friday that Pompeo’s remarks were “hypocritical” and insisted China is more “aware of its responsibility as a major power” than the United States, which has announced its withdrawal from W.H.O. President Donald Trump had previously warned the U.S. would leave the organization unless it implemented reforms to reduce Chinese Communist influence and give a full accounting of W.H.O’s many missteps during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Now that the US has announced its withdrawal from the W.H.O., what right do they have to dictate China’s cooperation with the W.H.O.?” Zhao asked.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman said that W.H.O. should send investigators to “trace the origin of the virus in the U.S.,” which was either a childish outburst of sarcasm or an allusion to the deranged conspiracy theories certain Chinese officials have floated about the coronavirus beginning as a U.S. Defense Department bioweapons project. Zhao Lijian was one of those officials.
On Friday, the Chinese Centers for Disease Control restated its theory that the recent coronavirus outbreak in Beijing may have been caused by a mutated strain of the coronavirus imported to China in contaminated food products.
The Beijing outbreak is believed to have spread from the massive Xinfadi marketplace, where both imported and domestically-produced foods are sold. The outbreak got past Beijing’s supposedly unparalleled coronavirus defenses because it had mutated and developed certain new characteristics, according to the Chinese CDC.
According to a report by China’s state-run Global Times, extensive testing established the Beijing outbreak was caused by a strain significantly different from the Wuhan coronavirus:
This result shows that the virus detected in Xinfadi is completely different from the virus identified earlier in Wuhan, Central China’s Hubei, as its strain is from Europe, suggesting that the imported products brought the virus to China and triggered the domestic transmission, Yang Zhanqiu, the deputy director of the pathogen biology department at Wuhan University, told the Global Times on Friday.
Not just in Beijing, coronavirus was detected on the packaging of frozen white shrimps imported from Ecuador in Dalian, Northeast China’s Liaoning Province, and Xiamen, East China’s Fujian Province on Friday, prompting Chinese authorities to suspend imports from three shrimp producers in Ecuador.
“The risk of subsequent new infections is low, and Beijing’s outbreak has been effectively controlled,” Chinese CDC said of the current status of the outbreak.