Communist China is refusing to cooperate with the second phase of an investigation by the World Health Organization (WHO) into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic — an investigation that is expected to focus on the possibility that the pandemic originated in a Chinese lab.
“In some aspects, the WHO’s plan for next phase of investigation of the coronavirus origin doesn’t respect common sense, and it’s against science,” Zeng Yixin, deputy head of China’s National Health Commission, said. “It’s impossible for us to accept such a plan.”
Zeng added, “We hope the WHO would seriously review the considerations and suggestions made by Chinese experts and truly treat the origin tracing of the COVID-19 virus as a scientific matter, and get rid of political interference.”
Zeng claimed that “no worker or researcher at the WIV got infected by coronavirus,” without evidence and despite a report from The Wall Street Journal earlier this year that said three workers at the lab became ill with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 shortly before China acknowledged the first cases in the pandemic.
“The details of the reporting go beyond a State Department fact sheet, issued during the final days of the Trump administration, which said that several researchers at the lab, a center for the study of coronaviruses and other pathogens, became sick in autumn 2019 ‘with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness,’” The Wall Street Journal noted. “The disclosure of the number of researchers, the timing of their illnesses and their hospital visits come on the eve of a meeting of the World Health Organization’s decision-making body, which is expected to discuss the next phase of an investigation into Covid-19’s origins.”
China claims that the first confirmed case of the coronavirus came on December 8, 2019. Chinese officials have repeatedly tried to dismiss accusations that the pandemic could have originated in the Wuhan lab, which is where Chinese researchers worked on bat coronaviruses. The South China Morning Post reported in March 2020 that, according to Chinese government data observed by the publication, the first confirmed case of COVID-19 occurred on November 17, 2019.
David Asher, the State Department’s former lead investigator who oversaw the Task Force into the COVID-19 virus origin, has worked for Democrat and Republican administrations on some of “the most classified intelligence investigations” for the U.S. government. Asher said that he is “very doubtful that three people in highly protected circumstances” working on coronaviruses all became sick enough with influenza-like symptoms that they were hospitalized in “severe conditions all in the same week, and it didn’t have anything to do with the coronavirus.”
The WHO is now demanding “audits” be conducted of Chinese labs in the vicinity of where the first cases of COVID-19 were identified. The Washington Post reported last week that WHO, in response to questions from the newspaper, will change a joint report with China on the origins of the pandemic to “clarify that the first family cluster was not linked to the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan.”
The latest news comes as the Biden administration now acknowledges the possibility that the pandemic originated from a Chinese lab is now at least as likely as the theory that it originated in nature.
Asher, previously told Fox News that biostatisticians from the U.S. government calculated that the odds of the coronavirus evolving naturally to be “one-in-13 billion.”