11pt”>Chinese officials insisted the raw data was unavailable but the rebuff to a World Health Organisation (WHO) team has deepened concerns about Beijing’s efforts to conceal the spread of the virus in 2019….
One of the main challenges emerged after the experts learnt that more than 90 people needed hospital treatment for Covid-like symptoms in central China in the two months before the first official cases were recorded in Wuhan in December 2019.
It is widely believed that the virus must have been circulating before those known infections. But evidence of the earlier spread would embarrass Beijing.
It has portrayed China’s handing of the coronavirus as a stunning success and insisted there is no evidence that the outbreak began on Chinese soil. Instead, it has pursued an ABC — anywhere but China — strategy, claiming the virus was imported in frozen food, originated in Europe or was engineered in a US military laboratory.
So it was perhaps predictable that the WHO scientists were frustrated in their efforts to pursue evidence about hospital cases that could expose a different story. The team asked to test old waste water samples for traces of the virus — analysis of sewage for diseases is a routine check — but were told the material had been “discarded”, Dwyer said.
When they requested access to blood donations collected at the time — another standard forensic investigation protocol — they were again turned down.
And the WHO played right along, dismissing the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan Virology Lab, but suggesting that the frozen food scenario warranted further investigation.
One long-running controversy before the mission was whether there could have been an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a laboratory that researches coronaviruses borne by bats from other parts of China.
[Peter] Daszak, the British zoologist, heads the EcoHealth Alliance charity in America and has worked with the institute for 15 years. He has dismissed the lab leak theory as “baloney”.
Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO team leader, said the mission ruled out the possibility of a laboratory leak after reassurances from scientists heading the WIV.
After visiting the facility, Embarek, a food safety expert, said “frank” discussions with institute scientists convinced them that there was no need to pursue the theory. “They’re the best ones to dismiss the claims and provide answers to all the questions,” he said.
Critics of the WHO highlighted the team’s reliance on institute chiefs — including Shi Zhengli, known as China’s “bat woman” after her virus-hunting trips to caves — to answer questions about their own facility.
So their detailed investigation of the lab leak theory involved asking the nice people at the lab what they thought. Had there been a leak? "No chance" said the nice people at the lab. "Fine", said the WHO.
Isn't that how all the best investigations proceed? You ask the accused if they did it, and if they say no, you drop the charges. After all, they're in the best position to know.
“The WHO mission was a charade,” said Richard Ebright, an American scientist and biosafety expert. “It has no credibility.”
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