China points finger at U.S. as WHO experts offer vindication to Wuhan lab

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It’s time for World Health Organization investigators to fly to the U.S. to search for the origins of the pandemic, the Chinese government said Wednesday, after an expert mission to Wuhan gave credence to Beijing’s arguments that the deadly coronavirus first emerged elsewhere.

Experts with the WHO reported this week that, after some four weeks in Wuhan, they had found no natural reservoirs of SARS-CoV-2 in China and failed to uncover any cases of human infection earlier than those already identified by Chinese authorities in Wuhan. They recommended further study of the possibility that the virus could be transported on frozen foods, a theory made prominent in recent months by Chinese officials and scientists. They suggested its time to take the search for the coronavirus origin outside Chinese borders. And they dismissed as “extremely unlikely” the possibility, advanced by skeptics in the U.S. and elsewhere, that the virus behind COVID-19 emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, where the outbreak first began to spread.

The Chinese government, which has already largely succeeded in turning the pandemic into a domestic narrative of viral triumph, was quick to seize a new impetus to convince the world of the same.

The willingness to vindicate China is not universal. One of the WHO experts said Wednesday that searching elsewhere is unlikely to find the source of the pandemic. “I think it started in China,” Australian infectious disease specialist Dominic Dwyer told Nine News. “I think the evidence for it starting elsewhere in the world is actually very limited. There is some evidence but it’s not really very good.”

But the Chinese government took the WHO findings as a clear indication of support from the world’s pre-eminent international health body, and immediately reiterated demands that the WHO investigate the U.S., too.

“We hope that the U.S. side will follow China’s example and invite WHO experts to carry out the tracing investigation in the U.S.,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Wednesday.

It’s the latest example of how Beijing has sought to advance its global standing — and sought doubt about that of Washington — through a pandemic that China has largely quelled, while the U.S. continues to see the broad spread of new infections. It’s an effort with considerable consequences, as China seeks to shift responsibility for the outbreak of a pandemic that has killed millions and badly damaged the global economy.

In the U.S., where the Donald Trump White House had decried the WHO for what it called pro-China leanings, State Department spokesman Ned Price said the Joe Biden administration would withhold judgment.

“Rather than rush to conclusions that may be motivated by anything other than the science, we want to see where that data leaves us, and based on that, we’ll come to a conclusion,” he said.

China’s foreign ministry has previously suggested the U.S. Army could have brought COVID-19 to China, and raised questions about whether it could have come from Fort Detrick, the military germ lab ordered to halt some work in 2019 because of insufficient wastewater safety systems. The U.S. Army allegation was based on groundless speculation published by a Canadian conspiracy theory website. China has offered no evidence for its Fort Detrick questions.

Chinese state media have also spent months advocating a theory that the virus has spread through cold-chain movement of food products, and therefore could have originated elsewhere. Western scientists have expressed considerable skepticism.

But the head of the WHO team has given full backing to that idea. “We also have to do much more into understanding the possible role of the cold chain frozen products in the introduction of the virus over a distance,” Peter Ben Embarek said Tuesday. He added: “It would be interesting to explore if a frozen wild animal that was infected could be a potential vehicle for the introduction of the virus.”

For Chinese scientists, it was a conspicuous endorsement.

“This is certainly a victory and good news for our country,” said Ma Jin, a public health scholar at Shanghai Jiaotong University. Not only has the WHO backed the Chinese contention that “the place of outbreak is not necessarily the place of origin,” he said, but that suggestion gives far broader credence to the Chinese virus response.

If the virus came from outside China, Beijing can claim credit for being first to spot it and downplay a response that saw authorities initially deny the possibility of human-to-human transmission and punish doctors for discussing an emerging new health threat. Rather than the source of a deadly pandemic, China could claim to be a trustworthy sentinel that fell victim to a virus from elsewhere.

“If the virus did come from outside the country, that would further support the efficiency and effectiveness of China’s response to the epidemic,” Prof. Ma said. “Compared to other countries, China is undoubtedly a global leader in terms of epidemic combat and public health emergency response mechanisms. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call ourselves the country that has, so far, done the best job.”

Among the WHO experts, meanwhile, there were new calls to cast aside a jostling between countries its own work has helped to further augment. It’s “very significant” that the WHO experts were unanimous in concluding that the possibility of a lab-leaked virus is “extremely unlikely” and unworthy of further study, Peter Daszak, a parasitologist and ecologist on the WHO experts team, told Chinese state broadcaster CGTN Wednesday.

Mr. Daszak, a colleague of the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology whose work included manipulating viruses to make them more infectious to humans, has been among those most dedicated to arguing that SARS-CoV-2 did not emerge from a laboratory.

“Some people will never support that and they will continue to promote these rumours and conspiracies,” he said, before defending the WHO experts’ work.

“I know that this work is for the good of the planet,” he said. “Politics isn’t always for the good of the planet.”

-with reporting by Alexandra Li

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