Canada's Prime Minister's Unreciprocated Love Affair With China

"Threats, censorship and intimidation will continue as long as companies, not-for-profits academia, politicians, media and other institutions with vested interests are fearful of angering Beijing."

"Beijing is effectively exporting their authoritarianism overseas."

"Dissidents are not safe. Not at work, not in their homes, not in civil societies, and not in Canada."

"[There is a] persistent lack of knowledge and understanding of these networks of influence within Canadian institutions, politics and society [which permits Chinese infiltration to influence Canada to go under the radar]."

Cherie Wong, executive director, Alliance Canada Hong Kong 

"[China has also expanded its influence through academia, particularly in the area of research and development, often through] ludicrous funding opportunities that trap academics and researchers into long-term coercive relationships [funded by foreign actors]."

"Inadequate federal regulations [have allowed such partnerships to continue]."

"Beijing aims to influence the next generation of technologies to disrupt, dominate, and silence democratic nations, making it clear they do not intend to follow the international order or be a fair and transparent global partner."

Report, Alliance Canada Hong Kong

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with investigating the origins of COVID-19, in Wuhan, Hubei province, China on Feb. 3, 2021. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

 

The most recent egregious Canada-China interaction has a sinister air of confidence, marked top secret in a country whose prime minister once infamously and naively stated his admiration for the Chinese Communist Party, able to 'turn on a dime'. Justin Trudeau recalls fondly when as a child he accompanied his father, then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau to China, opening Canada up to the CCP, just as he had taken the current prime minister Justin Trudeau in those long-ago days to Cuba to meet with 'Uncle Castro' for whom he long retained a fondness.

As prime minister, Justin Trudeau makes decisions that impact the entire country. As he did, when the novel coronavirus escaped China's borders to make deadly inroads globally, by making the decision that Canada would seek a vaccine in collaboration with a Chinese pharmaceutical company, CanSino, whose CEO and founder had attended a Canadian university and worked for a Canadian pharmaceutical enterprise before returning to China.

Prime Minister Trudeau in tandem with the National Research Council underwrote CanSino Biologics by providing it with Canadian intellectual property on which to base its vaccine for Ebola and SARS-CoV-2. Under the agreement reached with CanSino, Canadian technology would be used as a scaffold on which to build a successful COVID vaccine which was meant to be tested at Dalhousie University, with the NRC helping to produce it in Canada if successful. Beijing decided,  however, to block the vaccine from being shipped to Canada.

Leaving Canada in a vacuum of vaccine acquisition, since no contracts had been signed with reliable pharmaceutical companies capable of producing vaccines. Scrambling, in a late start to acquire vaccines, Canada was late in their use since it was back-of-the-line in contracting for doses to inoculate Canadians against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But there is far, far more to the Canada-China 'collaboration'. A connection between Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, both high-security labs involved in research with highly lethal pathogens.

 

The head scientist at Winnipeg's Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies section in the Special Pathogens Program lab was Xiangguo Qiu, a Chinese virologist. In July of 2019, she and her husband Keding Cheng, as well as several of her Chinese students were escorted out of the lab by the RCMP. No explanation was given while officials stated only that a procedural investigation was underway. There were rumours in circulation of unauthorized shipment of deadly viruses from the laboratory to China; otherwise known as purloined intellectual property.

The two top scientists were eventually fired when the Canadian Security Intelligence Service called for revocation on national security grounds of their security clearance. Another Chinese scientist, Feihu Yan involved in the Winnipeg lab as a researcher with the Chinese military's Academy of Military Medical Sciences, made heads swivel. Andy Ellis, formerly with CSIS noted it was "madness" for the Public Health Agency of Canada, responsible for the Winnipeg laboratory, to cooperate with the People's Liberation Army.

"It is ill-advised. It is the top lab in Canada. It is just incredible naivete on their part", he emphasized. The Public Health Agency of Canada refuses to disclose anything relating to the firing of the two Chinese scientists much less about the lab research or the relationship of the National Microbiology Laboratory with the Wuhan Virology Laboratory, much less the third skeleton in the closet, the involvement of the Chinese military.

In this 2017 file photo, Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli works with other researchers in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The so-called Wuhan lab-leak theory postulates that researchers may have been studying or even modifying such viruses to better understand them, and that a lab accident allowed the virus to escape. (Associated Press)

New life has lately been breathed into the theory of the Wuhan Laboratory studying bat viruses, its close geographical proximity to the fresh wild animal market in Wuhan where suspicion was that the strange new pneumonia-causing virus that had surfaced in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, later identified as a novel coronavirus that moved swiftly to infect large swaths of people in Wuhan, in China, and gradually but quickly the rest of the world, emerged. And COVID-19 was born. Was it a rare virus that crossed the species barrier from animal to human? Or a lab-escapee?

 

Prominent scientists are now insisting that the theory is no longer in the realm of conspiracy, that it is a feasible explanation for the presence of a new and deadly SARS virus. That the Wuhan Virology Laboratory was insufficiently secure and a virus that had been synthesized in the laboratory had somehow escaped, an escape with horrendous consequences -- and that Beijing was irresponsible in trying to hide its noxious presence and in so doing introduced a global threat to human existence.

 

The problem for Canada now, is its links with the laboratory and its obviously compromised position. While U.S. President Biden has authorized a deep investigation of the matter which Beijing most certainly will not cooperate with, in permitting access to the laboratory, to the market confines, to witnesses, to its scientists, to the records that it refused the WHO investigative team access to, the truth will somehow emerge, and Canada's role in the disaster will also emerge, damning its reputation, thanks to a prime minister with ambitions for a robust trade agreement with Beijing and a lack of common sense.

Republicans, including former president Donald Trump, have promoted the theory that the virus emerged from the Wuhan lab rather than naturally through human contact with an infected animal. While initially dismissed by some as a conspiracy theory, now credible scientists are saying a proper investigation needs to be done. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

COVID Convergence Mutations

"[I'm struck by the] amazing amount of convergent evolution we're seeing [with SARS-CoV-2]."

"There are these infamous mutations -- E484K, N501Y, and K417N -- which all three variants of concern are accumulating. That, added together, is very strong biology that this is the best version of this virus in the given moment."

Wendy Barclay, virologist, professor,Imperial College London

"If you wanted to sort of write a little textbook about viral evolution, it's happening right now."

"If it keeps happening over and over again, it must be providing some real growth advantage to this virus."

Dr.Francis Collins, geneticist, director, U.S. National Institutes of Health

"It's shown a very strong set of opening moves."

"We don't know what the end game is going to look like."

Vaughn Cooper, evolutionary biology specialist, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

National Institutes of Health Director Francis S. Collins holds a model of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, as he testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S. Graeme Jennings/Pool via REUTERS/

 

Perhaps it's just too much to hope for at this junction that the novel coronavirus is mutating itself out of the realm of viral pathogenic superiority. It's as though a contestant for the worst-killer-virus-in-history is given just so many moves to improve its game, and it's making the wrong choices, and compounding them in an effort to become more deadly, whereas the process it's undergoing is beginning to mute its morbid effects on its human hosts.

Spike protein of SARS-CoV-2

The new variants that were detected in geographies far from one another, such as Brazil, South Africa and Britain mutated spontaneously within a short time-frame late last year, where all three share some similar mutations located in the vital 'spike' region of the virus, enabling it to enter and infect human cells. The E484k mutation, that some scientists familiarly named "EEk" for its capacity to evade natural immunity from previous COVID-19 infections while reducing protection offered by current vaccines, which is designed to target the spike protein, is included.

Similar mutations independent of one another have been appearing in various parts of the globe, indicating that the coronavirus is in the process of undergoing "convergent evolution", according to a number of scientists Reuters has interviewed. With expectations that the coronavirus will continue to mutate, immunologists and virologists now suspect that the coronavirus may be exhausting the fixed number of moves its evolutionary cycle allows.

If such is actually the case, the long-term impact for its survival remains to be seen, based on whether a limit exists on the number of possible mutations it can attain to, making it less dangerous. "It is plausible that this virus has a relatively limited number of antibody escape mutations it can make before it has played all of its cards, so to speak", explained Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, San Diego.

That being the case, drugmakers could be enabled to remain current with the virus, developing booster vaccines meant to target current variants directly, even as governments struggle to control a pandemic that has succeeded in killing close to three million people globally. Experts have been mulling over the theory that the virus could be imbued with a limited number of mutations since early February, and it has gathered momentum since a paper was published showing the spontaneous appearance of seven variants in the United States alone, all appearing in the same region of the spike protein.

The very process of different species independently evolving like traits to improve survival odds represents the core of evolutionary biology. The current pandemic represents an evolutionary process scientists have been able to study in real time through the vast scope of its impact, with 127.3 million global infections. No pathogen in history has ever evolved within a comparable global scrutiny as has SARS=CoV-2.

This coronavirus in particular is not held by scientists to be particularly 'clever'. It is programmed by nature to replicate itself every time it infects people. Each copy the virus produces can be flawed in its exactness to the original. Some of these inexact copies may be one-time occurrences, while those that render a survival advantage to the coronavirus have a tendency to persist. And before compromising its fitness or changing so much it is no longer the same virus, leads some specialists to believe the virus may have a limited number of mutations available to it.

"I don't think it's going to reinvent itself with extra teeth", Ian Jones, a professor of virology at University of Reading in Britain, added. "If it had an unlimited number of tricks ... we would see an unlimited number of mutants, but we don't", observed Michael Nussenzweig, immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York. 

However, predicting how a virus will mutate is challenging. Should there be limits on how the coronavirus could evolve, matters would certainly be simplified for vaccine developers. As an example Novavax Inc. is in the process of adapting its vaccine specifically to target the South Africa variant which appeared to render current vaccines less effective, in laboratory tests. According to chief executive Stan Erck, the virus is capable of so much change only yet still binds to human hosts. The hope is that the vaccine would "cover the vast majority of strains that are circulating". 

Data-sharing platforms like the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Flu Data is enabling researchers to track the variants through its huge trove of coronavirus genomes. Recently, scientists identified seven U.S. coronavirus variants with mutations occurring in the same location in a critical portion of the virus representing additional evidence of convergent evolution.

Experiments exposing the virus to antibodies in an effort to force it to mutate are being carried out by other teams of researchers. The same mutation in many cases appeared as a result, including the infamous E484K. Helping to raise cautious optimism that mutations appear to share many of the same traits, even as tracking changes in the virus must continue to choke off its ability to mutate by reducing transmission through vaccinations and other measures taken to limiting the virus's spread.

Scientists at Duke University sequenced positive coronavirus tests to identify which strains are circulating in the community, on Feb. 3.Credit...Pete Kiehart for The New York Times

COVID's Elusive Origins : WHO Report

 Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus Fabrice Coffrini/AFP

"Although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation, potentially with additional missions involving specialist experts, which I am ready to deploy."

"[The international expert team had] expressed the difficulties they encountered in accessing raw data [while in China]."

"[The report also] raises further questions that will need to be addressed by further studies."

"I expect future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing."

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General, World Health Organization

 

Members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the novel coronavirus arrive by car at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province on February 3, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP)

"I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory escape."

"Other people don't believe that, that's fine, science will eventually figure it out."

Robert Redfield, virologist, former head, Centres for Disease Control

"[The Institute saw] no disruptions or incidents."

"[A formal audit of the laboratory was] far beyond what our team is mandated to do or has the tools and capabilities to do."

"The fact that we assessed this hypothesis [that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab] as extremely unlikely doesn't mean it's ruled out."

Peter Ben Embarek, WHO investigative team

"We were allowed to ask whatever questions we wanted, and we got answers. The only evidence that people have for a lab leak is that there is a lab in Wuhan."

"A thousand samples [of animals sold at the Huanan market when the WHO investigative team took samples from 188 animals of 18 species at the market, all of which tested negative] is a great start, but there’s more to do."

WHO team member Peter Daszak

Animal markets like this one in China could be a source of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the WHO report.   Credit: Eric Lafforgue/Art In All Of Us/Corbis via Getty

The World Health Organization's investigative team of ten travelled to Wuhan, China for the express purpose of conducting an unbiased, scientific survey of any available evidence in an attempt to determine the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that swept the world when it first surfaced as a strange new pneumonia-like pathogen deadlier and more infectious than most viruses that erupt from time to time in the East and spread eventually worldwide. The WHO team had plenty of local assistance in their diligent search for answers during their two-week stay.

There were quite a few interviews and on-site examinations, bearing in mind that the team had to first isolate on arriving in China before they could proceed. With them throughout their investigative exercise was a matching team of Chinese scientists to give them aid and direction, some 17 in number. The People's Republic of China was deeply and sincerely invested in the search for the origins of the novel coornavirus, making certain that at all times the WHO researchers were escorted by Chinese officialdom.

WHO microbiologists and medical researchers fully intended to do a thorough and creditable job of searching for answers while conducting interviews under constant supervision in the presence of government officials. Needless to say every individual who was questioned to gain a wider and more full understanding of what had occurred would have been under a certain level of constraint, testifying under the fixed scrutiny of government agents. In their minds no doubt, the fate of Li Wenliang accused of 'spreading harmful rumours' when he first alerted his colleagues to the presence of a threatening new virus. Before he himself died of COVID.

"It's essentially a highly-chaperoned, highly-curated study tour ... this group of experts only saw what the Chinese government wanted them to see", explained Jamie Metzl, former senior adviser to then-U.S.President Bill Clinton. What is known is simply that a novel coronavirus erupted from some source within walking distance of the high-security laboratory under the aegis of the Wuhan Institute of Virology specializing in the study of coronaviruses. It is also known that the laboratory is located not far from the wild animal 'wet' market where both domestic animals and exotic animals were sold, dead and alive.

And it was the market that Chinese authorities pointed to as the unfortunate source of cross-species, animal-to-human viral vector. These wet markets exist throughout Asia where an insatiable appetite for exotic animals like bats, snakes, pangolins and many other creatures can be satisfied. Crossing the species barrier for pathogens is rare, but it does happen. It did with AIDS and we know what agony that led to throughout the world.

"We could show the virus was circulating in the market as early as December 2019."

"A lot of good leads were suggested in this report, and we anticipate that many, if not all of them, will be followed through because we owe it to the world to understand what happened, why and how to prevent it from happening again."

Peter Ben Embarek,  co-leader, WHO investigative team

Long before the novel coronavirus was identified, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had come in for lax safety regulation criticism when a U.S. team of scientists had visited the premises and felt alarm at the situation prevailing there. That very same laboratory is involved in a security breach that took place in Canada's own National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg when a high-profile Chinese scientist and her husband, both employed there, were escorted from the lab never to return. Involved in an unauthorized transfer of highly sensitive biological samples from there to the Wuhan lab.

The team of WHO investigators appear to have reached the conclusion through a joint report that a lab escape of the coronavirus was to be regarded as "extremely unlikely" following a brief examination of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Four hours were spent at the facility by the WHO team, the investigation limited to interviews with laboratory staffers where the investigators were informed that no disruptions or incidents occurred, and nor did the WHO investigators request collaborative documentation.

The Beijing government appears to have withheld case data from outside investigators, the WHO team no exception. China, it would appear, deigned not to honour a request to turn over 174 health records from the first patients in Wuhan to contract COVID-19: "They showed us a couple of examples, but that's not the same as doing all of them, which is standard epidemiological investigation", explained Dominic Dwyer of the WHO team.

What the WHO team reported was that 92 cases of Wuhan patients exhibiting COVID-like symptoms were documented in October of 2019, quite a few weeks before the officially recognized first cases were reported by the Chinese government. The investigators were given Chinese assurances that serological tests indicated no link to COVID-19.

 

 

India: Rescued by Herd Immunity

"It was totally overwhelming. November was the worst. We could only accommodate the number of patients we could discharge."

"We were managing very, very sick patients in the ward, as there was no room in the ICU."

"To our relief and surprise, the number of cases have started to come down drastically."

"If the situation continues like this for a month, we can say we have achieved sustained low numbers because of immunity and vaccination."

"But we have to keep our fingers crossed. These good times may not continue forever."

Dr.Sushila Kataria, Medanta hospital, New Delhi  

A mural in New Delhi is part of public health messaging in India. The country has seen a dramatic decline in new cases since the fall, but researchers aren't sure why.  Sanchit Khanna/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

"What we seem to have done is let the virus run its course. By not flattening the curve in the beginning, India went through the herd immunity threshold and the epidemic seems to be naturally coming down."

"We will never know how many people died -- no one is counting."

Jacob John, virologist, retired professor, Christian Medical College, Vellore, Tamil Nadu state

"I am hopeful the worst is over. In certain areas, like large cities, we may have come close to achieving a good amount of immunity -- if not herd immunity, close to it."

"The estimates are that 30 to 50 percent of individuals may have had asymptomatic or mild infections and not gotten tested. Many who had developed mild symptoms may have had COVID-19 without realizing it."

Dr.Randeep Guleria, director, All India Institute of Medical Sciences

"We are seeing a lot less severe disease than the rest of t he world, and a lot more asymptomatic infections."

"Part of the reason might be prior exposure to lots of other pathogens. We live in an environment where we are exposed to all kinds of pathogens all the time and we learn not to react too much."

"It looks like the virus has really spread widely in the country. Maybe the reason the numbers are crashing is that most people have been infected and infection gives you at least 80 percent protection for months at a time."

"If you look at the places that did well with control early on, they are the ones [that] have a high level of infection now."

"And if a variant comes along that escapes immune responses, then everyone is in play again."

Gagandeep Kang, microbiologist

India has recorded some 10.7 million Covid-19 infections so far   Reuters

 

Exhausted doctors in New Deli whose non-stop reaction to the COVID pandemic left them overworked, isolated for fear they would transmit a virus to their families, and anxious to see the end of the nightmare of the SARS-CoV-2 viral epidemic are incredulous but thankful to recognize that daily new infections in India's capital have seen a sharp drop in recent weeks. This is a trend that has extended well beyond New Delhi where India's new confirmed coronavirus infections nationally have fallen suddenly from a peak of close to 100,000 new infections daily in September to an average of 13,000 to 14,000 each day at the present time.

Health surveys reveal that much higher public exposure to the virus than was previously understood to have occurred was the reality. While many other countries all with infinitely smaller populations are struggling through second and third waves and recognizing the emergence of troubling new variants of the coronavirus, India's precipitous drop in infections seems to indicate that their version of the pandemic is well on its way to burning out in India. 

Speculation has led to the conclusion that this is the result of the nation's crowded cities and that the level of communication of the virus has led to natural "herd immunity" having arisen even before vaccines have been widely used in mass inoculations. The most reasonable hypothesis to the surprise drop in infections is seen to focus on the virus spread losing steam, a situation leading to cautious optimism that the pandemic's shadow is slinking off, allowing the country to begin repair of its collapsed economy resulting from a strict lockdown, restrictions and public fear.

The Reserve Bank of India recently issued a bulletin alerting to the "increasing probability" of a stronger-than-anticipated economic rebound in lock step with COVID receding. "Barring the visitation of a second wave, the worst is behind us. The recovery is getting stronger in its traction, and soon the winter of our discontent will be made glorious summer", the bulletin poetically crowed.

Back in March when India began reeling under the certainty that the first few hundred coronavirus infections would soon balloon out to hundreds of thousands, a draconian nationwide lockdown was imposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for which he apologized as a necessity to avert complete disaster. The purpose, he explained, was to break the chain of viral transmission. Public transport was suspended for months, people could only buy food, medicine and cleaning products while India's economy contracted 24 percent year on year.

In a country where millions live in tight proximity sharing community toilets and water taps in congested slums, lockdown failed to accomplish its purpose. The pathogen spread from the cities into the hinterlands carried by laid-off migrant workers who returned to their far-off villages. Over 10.7 million confirmed coronavirus infections were reported in all of India, the second-highest number following that of the U.S. Even so, experts feel the real case total to be much higher; most infections not recognized nor recorded.

Photo: PTI

"The reported cases are not even remotely a reflection of true cases -- they only reflect people who got tested. For reasons that we don't fully know, the virus has spread like wildfire in India -- more than in any other country in the world", stated Vikram Patel, professor of global health at Harvard Medical School. Over half of residents in cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Pune have been exposed to the virus according to seroprevalence studies. An estimate of 31 million infections by mid-August in Karnataka state, included 44 percent of the rural population and 54 percent of the urban population.

Over 154,000 COVID-19 deaths were reported in India, but the actual death count may never be known, since most Indians tend to die at home without a cause of death ever formally determined. Some researchers, despite that reality, feel that India's COVID mortality rate has in all probability not been as high as many other regions given the relative youth of the country's population with just 6.5 percent over 65 years of age in comparison to Europe's one-fifth.

Health economist Rijo John, based in Kerala, feels the virus strain that has swept through India is a less virulent one than has inundated populations elsewhere. "It's pretty generally accepted that in India, we have a very mild form of the virus. But the future is hard to predict." For the meanwhile, however, India's pandemic appears to be in steep decline.Most of the country's 270 million schoolchildren have been out of class since March. White-collar professionals work from home and have done so for almost a year, with most elderly people remaining exclusively at home, susceptible to infection.

An ambitious vaccination campaign has been launched by the government with an aim to inoculate 300 million Indians by August's end. A number that includes health-care workers and the elderly. Roughly 3 million people have been vaccinated once the drive began two weeks earlier indicating that reaching the total of 300 million will probably become a slow, protracted process.

"A lot of this is in the rear-view mirror but that doesn't mean we are done and dusted yet."

"We have an artificial situation in which we've reached an equilibrium, but if we went back to normal, there is still a lot of room for cases going up."

Ramanan Laxminarayan, director, Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy

Cumulative severity of COVID-19 and proportionate mortality from top causes (percent)   Source: Johns Hopkins University; World Health Organization.

Beijing, Vindicatng Itself

Mr Zhang's father (Supplied: Zhang Hai)

"Very important site visits today -- a wholesale market first & Huanan Seafood Market just now."  "Very informative & critical for our joint teams to understand the epidemiology of COVID as it started to spread at the end of 2019."

Peter Daszak, zoologist with U.S. group EcoHealth Alliance, member of WHO team

 

"The government's first priority is to protect the people's health and safety, but it failed to inform the public as soon as the coronavirus outbreak happened."

"My father, a very patriotic soldier, had devoted his youth to the nation … but he was killed by COVID-19 in his later life."

"The epidemic would never happen if the government had truly put the people's interest [as their] first priority."

"[He wouldn't trust visits organized and limited by the Chinese government, and thought the information patients gave could be] highly suspicious."

"They could have been trained many months ago, and been ordered to stage and repeat the government's narrative."

"I am highly concerned that the WHO experts in Wuhan are not a match for these counterfeiters."

 Zhang Hai, 51, Wuhan resident

 

The WHO team visits an exhibition about the Government's successful response to contain the coronavirus in Wuhan on Saturday.   (AP: Ng Han Guan)

"[I had] police interviews, cameras pointing at home, and dismissal from work. They pressured my families, stalked my activities, which is completely unscrupulous."

"[I am told] don't contact the foreign media, because it will be used by anti-China forces, which is detrimental to our country."

"I just want everyone to know that the government is a murderer for hiding the epidemic."

 Parent who lost an only child

Government propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party officially denies it was in any way irresponsible over its handling of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, over charges that it waited too long to warn the international community and the World Health Organization of its discovery of a strange new pneumonia-like illness that was plaguing people in Wuhan City. Its assurance when it did alert the WHO that person-to-person transmission was unlikely was inaccurate and harmful to the world's understanding of what was unfolding.

Not only does Beijing deny that it acted in anything but a responsible manner, but it also denies that the virus itself first emerged in Hubei Province, northern China. Rather, the propaganda slyly insists it emerged elsewhere, abroad, and was imported to China. That happened in one of two ways, they claim; either through infected frozen meat exported by a European country into China, or it was deliberately brought to China by U.S. agents. 

Beijing's inexcusable attempts to hide the presence of a new, highly contagious and lethal-to-the-elderly virus, its silencing of physicians in Wuhan hospitals who raised the alarm, threatening them and accusing them of spreading 'false news', also did not happen, but represents a malicious attempt on the part of the West to smear China. Casually speaking of the virus as the 'Wuhan virus', or the 'Chinese virus' sends Beijing into paroxysms of fury, but not a word is murmured by the WHO about racism when the media speak of the new 'U.K.' mutation', or the 'South African' variant.

Beijing screamed bloody murder and called it racism when other countries began to close their borders to China, and the World Health Organization chastised those that did, wagging a finger of racism at them as well. Yet once China succeeded during the first wave of the coronavirus to achieve a measure of control, it closed its borders to entry from abroad, where Italy and Spain in particular were experiencing a crisis in runaway COVID infection rates overwhelming their health care systems.

A security person moves journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology after a World Health Organization team arrived for a field visit in Wuhan in China's Hubei province on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021. The WHO team is investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has visited two disease control centers in the province. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

American authorities and some U.S. bioscientists raised the possibility that the virus was an escapee of a biohazard laboratory located not far from the Wuhan live meat market which sold pangolin, wolf cubs, bats, snakes and other live animals for slaughter for the human palate and where the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was first said to have emerged. To this day there is no consensus of opinion over that hypothesis; eminent scientists declare it to be hugely unlikely while others retain suspicion.

China delayed the entry of the WHO team of investigators to Wuhan City although it had initially agreed that it would cooperate with their mission to study the breakout of the virus that had crossed the species barrier from wild animals to human victims, not an entirely rare occurrence and invariably difficult to control. But after delays and controversy, the team, having undergone a 14-day mandatory isolation period on arrival in China, is now into its third day of a two-week investigation.

"The team plans to visit hospitals, laboratories and markets. Field visits will include the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Huanan market, Wuhan CDC [Center for Disease Control and Prevention] laboratory."

"All hypotheses are on the table as the team follows the science in their work. They should receive the support, access and the data they need."

World Health Organization statement

 

"It is now that the actual field work can begin, and it is my expectation that for this part of the mission we will have unhindered access to the requested destinations and individuals."

"But it is important to remember that the success of this mission and origin-tracing is 100 percent depending on access to the relevant sources."

"No matter how competent we are, how hard we work and how many stones we try to turn, this can only be possible with the support from China."

Thea Fischer, Danish team member

China's foreign ministry for its part said the WHO team is scheduled to participate in seminars, visits and field trips, and it is no doubt hoping that it can de-politicize the assumptions some of the WHO members come equipped with, while carrying on its own politicization of a topic so overwhelmingly pervasive throughout the world and so deadly that millions of lives globally have been lost to the viral predator. Beijing, by setting its own program for the visit before the investigators, likely seeks to diminish the time allotted for the WHO members' own agenda while consuming that time in 'meetings'.

 

Beijing has also made it abundantly clear that it has complete control over where the WHO team will be escorted, always in the presence of handlers. And the many Chinese who are intent on being interviewed by the WHO team while Chinese authorities harass and threaten their outspokenness, is simply yet another facet of a lost cause; try as they sincerely will, with the obstacles placed in their path to fulfilling their mission, it is highly unlikely the WHO will come away with anything but Beijing's approved narrative.

 

A worker in protective overall passes by a warehouse at the Baishazhou wholesale market during a visit by the World Health Organization on the third day of field visit in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province on Sunday, Jan. 31, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)