China rejects WHO probe offer as suspicion over Covid-19 engineering in Wuhan grows

Joseph Abraham

China’s eastern province of Jiangsu is in the grip of virulent Delta variant and with each passing day the number of positive cases is increasing exponentially.

The similar situation prevails in Yunnan, a province which borders Myanmar—indicating China’s failure to defeat the virus despite claiming to administer 1.55 billion doses of SinoPharm to its people.

However, things that worry Chinese are the pandemic’s continued presence in the country in spite of untiring efforts by authorities to contain it. But then who will tell common Chinese people that the virus which continues to singe the world brutally with over four million dead so far, is a man made and developed in a lab in Wuhan.

Perhaps, the authoritarian system of the country would not allow them to know the truth. Even the world would not be able to get to the bottom of truth as China has rejected a World Health Organization plan for another Covid-19 investigation inside the country. With this rejection for a probe into the origin of the virus, the world has been denied critical data needed to identify and forestal future pandemics.

Not only that, it has deepened the growing suspicion that China intentionally engineered the virus for reasons known to President Xi Jinping and his confidants in the Communist Party of China. It confirms British scientist Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr Birger Sorensen’s claim that Chinese took a natural coronavirus backbone found in a bats’ cave in China and spliced onto it a new spike, turning it into a fatal and highly transmissible Covid-19.

These scientists’ study somewhere supported a theory that a relative of SARS-CoV-2, RATG13, a Coronavirus, was collected from a mineshaft in Mojiang of Yunnan province in South China by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is said that the mineshaft was infested with bats and six miners hired to clean the fecal of bats were infected with pneumonia-like illness. Three of them had died of it.

Almost similar views were earlier expressed by people working for DRASTIC, a group which claimed that a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to DRASTIC, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had an extensive collection of Coronavirus gathered over many years of foraging in the bat caves, where three men had died from a suspected SARS-like disease in 2012.

Both Professor Angus Dalgleish and Dr Birger Sorensen’s study published by ‘Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery,’ a noted British journal, claimed that they had prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China. They further alleged deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data in Chinese labs and silencing and disappearance of scientists in China who spoke about the activities there. Doctor Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist in Wuhan, the epicenter of Covid-19, was summoned by police and medical officials in the middle-of-the night in early January 2020 and warned him for raising an alarm that a troubling cluster of viral infections in Hubei province could grow out of control. Doctor Li, 34, was forced to sign a statement denouncing his alarm as an unfounded rumour.

Despite this, before he could continue his fight for the sake of humanity, the Wuhan City Central Hospital in the first week of February 2020 informed Li’s family members and friends through Weibo that the doctor died.

 “Dr Li had the misfortune to be infected during the fight against the novel coronavirus pneumonia epidemic, and all out-efforts to save him failed” the Wuhan City Central Hospital wrote on Weibo. Dr Li is remembered as the first whistleblower who warned about the contagiousness of the virus.#

Dr Li-Meng Yan, a scientist who is still in hiding over fear of her safety, opened a can of worms against the Chinese government by stating that she did some of the earlier research into Covid-19 in 2019. Speaking from a secret location to the British talk show “Loose Women,” in September 2020, she said the virus “comes from the lab—the lab in Wuhan and the lab is controlled by China’s government.” She also insisted that widespread reports that the virus originated in 2019 from a wet market in Wuhan are a “smoke screen.”

Amid this, if China denies WHO a fresh probe into the origin of the deadly virus, it amounts to strengthening worldwide negative sentiments against China and the CPC. In April 2020, the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, a government-affiliated think tank associated with China’s top intelligence agency, had already warned the Chinese government that global anti-China sentiment is at its highest since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Surprisingly, those countries where China has invested heavily by pumping in money for the development of dams, roads, power stations, railway lines, metros, football stadiums,  airports, seaports—under Belt and Road Initiative are also bristling with anti-China sentiments.

Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Zambia, Zimbabwe and numerous other countries from North to South and East to West are witnessing anti-China protests and rallies almost on a daily basis.

Already, China’s image as a human rights violator, intellectual property rights usurper and an expansionist that doesn’t spare even its allies and neighbours in forcibly occupying territories—is under battering at various international forums. The US, Europe, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and Vietnam detest China for its deceptive character.

In the background of the prevailing situation, sanity demanded that the Chinese government would bring a balance in its behaviour and let WHO probe properly into the origin of the coronavirus. It should have allowed the world body to undertake a follow-up to the January 2021 investigation, which was initially blocked and subsequently hampered by authorities.

But unfortunately, China in one stroke dashed the international community’s keen desire to know the truth about the emergence of the virus by rejecting the WHO plan for investigation into the Wuhan lab?