https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/07/china-blocks-who-investigation-lab-leak-theory-covid.htmlChina Declares Itself “Extremely Shocked” at New WHO Proposal to Reexamine Possible Wuhan Lab Leak
Even still, the head of the Chinse National Health Commission Zeng Yixin declared himself “extremely shocked” at the idea. China has repeatedly stonewalled international investigators charged with determining how we got in this mess, refusing to hand over raw data about the coronavirus’s origins, instead presenting its own analysis of the data. Beijing has stomped and stalled throughout the process and when a WHO team finished its four-week investigation on the ground in China earlier this year, the results remained wishy-washy. The WHO team did declare the theory that the virus accidentally leaked from a lab as “extremely unlikely,” while the Chinese government pushed for probes into outlandish origin theories of its own. Two favorites of China state-sponsored media are theories that the virus actually originated elsewhere, one positing that it arrived on frozen food packaging from Japan, and another that the virus was actually the product of the American military and had been circulating in the U.S. for months before it came to China.
The latest refusal is more of the same from China, again showing it doesn’t really have much incentive to dig any deeper other than good will and concern for the general wellbeing of the rest of the world. “I could feel that this plan revealed a lack of respect for common sense and an arrogant attitude toward science,” Zeng said of the latest WHO proposal. “We can’t possibly accept such a plan for investigating the origins.”
