Chinese state media seized on the World Health Organization’s (W.H.O.) controversial final report to declare the theory of Chinese laboratory origins for the coronavirus has been completely ruled out and W.H.O. should now begin checking the laboratories of other countries to see if any of them created the Chinese coronavirus and sent it to China.
China’s state-run Global Times on Wednesday quoted “Chinese scientists” who worked with W.H.O. during its visit to Wuhan in February suggesting that if W.H.O. “cannot find the answer in China regarding coronavirus origins, maybe it’s time for scientists to dig somewhere else and test more hypotheses to solve the mystery.”
The Global Times falsely claimed the W.H.O. report “dismissed the ‘lab-leak’ conspiracy theory” and claimed it endorsed the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) bizarre theory that the Chinese coronavirus was created in another country – where it mysteriously failed to spread the way it subsequently did everywhere on Earth, including Europe – and traveled to Wuhan by hitchhiking on frozen food packages.
In truth, even the report as written merely rates these hypotheses on a scale of probability and admitted none could be conclusively proven or disproven, at least not with the limited data China allowed the W.H.O. investigators to review. A growing number of scientists around the world have criticized the report for making even these tepid assessments of probability-based largely on information provided by the CCP. Chinese state media dismissed these concerns as “baseless.”
The Global Times dredged up the Communist conspiracy theory, notably pushed by Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian in the early months of the pandemic, that the Chinese coronavirus was created in an American bioweapons laboratory and brought to Wuhan by U.S. Army participants in the Military World Games.
The Global Times eventually admitted the W.H.O. team found these hypotheses to be highly improbable but recommended investigating it anyway. In the eyes of Chinese propagandists, the very mention of their conspiracy theories in the report granted them legitimacy.
“The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Tuesday night it appreciates the scientific, diligent and professional spirit of the WHO-China expert team and calls for further investigation in other countries and places to trace the virus origins as it is a global task after WHO released the joint report,” the Global Times wrote, quoting the Foreign Ministry’s admonition not to “politicize the tracing work.”
“Politicizing the traceability issue will only seriously hamper global traceability cooperation, undermine global anti-epidemic efforts, and lead to more loss of life. It runs counter to the desire of the international community to unite and fight the epidemic,” the Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday night, unsubtly threatening the rest of the world to stop investigating China if it expects Chinese cooperation on current or future health issues.
Another Global Times article on Wednesday noted the interesting lack of “solid scientific evidence” for the ostensibly most likely origin of the coronavirus: transmission from animals who developed or caught the disease in the wild to humans.
While skeptical scientists in other nations point to this dearth of evidence as suggestive of Chinese laboratory origins for Chinese coronavirus – reasoning that if the disease came from nature, there would be abundant evidence of animal infections, but none have been found – the Chinese state paper chalked it up to the “many positive measures” China took to “contain the viral spread” and chastised “foreign media speculations” that the coronavirus might have spread through China’s notoriously unsanitary “wet markets” and wildlife trade.
Yet another Global Times editorial on Wednesday painted China as eager to participate in the effort to trace the origins of the Chinese coronavirus on a “global scale.” As far as scientists working for the Chinese state are concerned, the book is closed on Wuhan and its laboratories, so now it’s time to search laboratories in every other country on Earth.
“In the next phase, we need a broader perspective. We will conduct comprehensive and detailed investigations and origins-tracing among a variety of animals, under the framework of global origins-tracing,” Chinese scientist Tong Yigang said.
According to the Global Times, Tong added a warning that “limited vision would be against science and may lead origins-tracing to a wrong direction.”
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