Wuhan inquiry in China’s interest

The disclosure by The Wall Street Journal that the US Department of Energy, based on new intelligence provided to the White House, has concluded, like the FBI, that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan may not be, as the newspaper noted, “definitive”. Four other US intelligence agencies, together with the National Intelligence Council, still judge the pandemic was most likely the result of a “natural transmission” from an infected animal. Two remain undecided.

But what the disclosure highlights is China’s continuing irresponsibility and gross lack of candour over the worst global health crisis in 100 years. It also underlines the importance of work done by reporters such as Sharri Markson, whose book What Really Happened in Wuhan has done much to maintain the focus on the Chinese Communist Party’s incomprehensible attempts to cover up the truth about the origins of the virus. Markson’s investigations and those of others have done much to counter the absurd reports (even in some US outlets) that have dismissed suggestions the virus emerged from a Wuhan lab as anti-Chinese racism.

Even the World Health Organisation, whose director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was seen to be a cat’s paw of Beijing’s outrageous dissembling at the start of the crisis, appears to have lost patience with Chinese stonewalling over establishing the origins of the pandemic.

With the third anniversary of the WHO’s declaration of the coronavirus as a pandemic on March 11, Dr Tedros has reiterated the world “needs to know how this started, in order to prevent the next one. It’s morally very important to know how we lost our loved ones.” The different conclusions reached even within the confines of the US intelligence community emphasise the importance of Dr Tedros’s current argument for a full, independent investigation. It also underscores the CCP’s stubbornness in failing to see a proper inquiry is as much in China’s interests as it is that of the rest of the world.

According to WHO data, there have been 757,264,511 recorded Covid cases around the world and a staggering 6,850,594 deaths. The cost to the global economy is probably incalculable. Yet with barefaced cynicism and mindless, self-defeating nationalism, Beijing refuses to do the right thing.

The US Department of Energy has vast scientific expertise. The fact that, with the benefit of new intelligence, it has aligned itself with the FBI’s judgment should weigh heavily, even within the CCP’s leadership.