Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, a member of the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) task force that visited China in March to investigate the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus, said Tuesday that another “research” trip to China would be useful, but should be kept separate from any effort to “audit” false or incomplete data provided by the Chinese.
After returning from Wuhan in March, Koopmans said her team found it “extremely unlikely” the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory, and was even more doubtful of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) favorite theory that the virus actually originated outside of China and was shipped there in frozen food.
She did not rule out either theory, although at the airport on her way home from China, she said the frozen food “cold chain” could not explain the pandemic by itself. “The virus has to come from somewhere,” she pointed out.
On Tuesday, Koopmans said her team would like to conduct more research in China and hoped the W.H.O. could arrange another visit with Chinese officials. She stressed pure research would have to remain separate from “auditing” the Chinese data, i.e. investigating the Communist Party for deliberate falsehoods.
“I think these cannot be combined. So, we believe that is a combination that will not work. In that case you say we are going to carry out an inspection, or we are going to do the follow-up research, or both, but through different mechanisms, otherwise you simply will not make any progress,” she said.
Koopmans made her recommendations as friendly and nonthreatening to Beijing as possible, but reporters nevertheless interpreted her comments as part of the growing pressure on China to permit a more thorough investigation of the laboratory origin hypothesis.
The timing seems significant, as the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia are calling for China to allow further investigation of the outbreak, and U.S. media organizations have suddenly decided lab leak is a credible hypothesis rather than the wild-eyed conspiracy theory they portrayed it as during the Trump administration.
The biggest news event in the abrupt evolution of lab leak into a topic of mainstream media discussion was the publication on Sunday of previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence about researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) seeking hospitalization with coronavirus-like symptoms in November 2019, well before China claims the outbreak began. Koopmans’ insistence on separating “research” from “auditing” could be taken as a signal to the Chinese that W.H.O. would not dig into the story about sick WIV researchers if its experts were allowed back into China.
The Biden administration is sending even more mixed signals than the W.H.O. in the wake of the Wuhan intelligence revelations. On Tuesday, CNN reported the Biden team shut down a confidential State Department investigation of Wuhan launched during the Trump administration. Possibly embarrassed by the timing of this story, President Joe Biden announced that he has ordered the U.S. intelligence committee to thoroughly investigate the lab leak hypothesis and report to him within 90 days.
The Communist Party is very unlikely to invite anyone, especially American intelligence agents, to rummage around in the WIV’s records and the Biden administration’s commitment to forcing such a confrontation with China is debatable, to say the least. Skeptics will doubt W.H.O. can find anything meaningful with a second trip to Wuhan, especially a cooperative, inoffensive “research mission” that studiously refrains from “auditing” any data provided by the Chinese government, but such a project might appeal to those who wish to check a few investigative boxes before chalking up Chinese coronavirus to a biological mystery that will never be solved.