China Rejects Demands for Outside Investigation into Wuhan Coronavirus Outbreak
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman: International calls for investigation “entirely without factual basis.”
On Monday, China rejected demands for an independent inquiry into Beijing’s handling of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.
The growing international calls for an investigation were “entirely without factual basis,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said while dismissing an Australian demand for an “independent international” probe into how the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic started in China.
“The issues around the coronavirus are issues for independent review, and I think that it is important that we do that,” Foreign Minister Marise Payne said on Sunday, “In fact, Australia will absolutely insist on that.”
An impartial inquiry was necessary given concerns “around transparency and ensuring that we are able to engage openly,” she added, referring to Communist China’s track record of silencing the whistleblowers and covering up crucial evidence surrounding the Coronavirus outbreak.
Reuters news agency reported Beijing’s response:
China dismissed as groundless on Monday Australia’s questioning of how Beijing handled the coronavirus pandemic, saying it had been open and transparent, despite growing scepticism about the accuracy of its official death toll.
Australia’s foreign minister, Marise Payne, called for an international investigation into the origins and spread of the virus, joining a chorus of concern over how China tackled the virus that emerged in its central city of Wuhan last year.
Since then the virus has caused nearly 2.4 million infections and more than 160,000 deaths worldwide, paralysing life and business in major cities.
In Beijing, a foreign ministry spokesman said Payne’s remarks were “entirely without factual basis,” adding that questioning China’s transparency was unfounded and showed a lack of respect for the sacrifices of its people.
“China expresses deep concern and resolute opposition to this,” Geng Shuang told reporters during a daily briefing.
The Australian statement came days after President Donald Trump announced that the United States was investigating whether the life-threatening virus was accidentally released from a high-security laboratory located in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
“We’re looking at it,” President Trump told reporters at a Coronavirus briefing on Friday. “If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake, but if they were knowingly responsible, yeah, I mean, then sure there should be consequences,” he added. Vice President Mike Pence, who heads the Wuhan Coronavirus task force, also joined the President in calling for “proper inquiries into this at the proper time.”
Communist China’s belligerence to an international investigation is understandable. Right at the onset of the outbreak, Beijing has been misleading the world and peddling falsehoods. Aided by the World Health Organization (WHO), a United Nations agency, China declared that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission,” as late as mid-January. Last week, Beijing revised the deaths in Wuhan, revealing 50 percent more fatalities than previously declared.
The revision of deaths in Wuhan raises suspicions since it is the epicenter for the contagion. The Central Chinese city is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a facility known to have been working on bat-borne viruses similar to the coronavirus, which broke out in the area.
The concerns about the Wuhan facility are not new. U.S. diplomats had warned about safety procedures in these labs after visiting the place in January 2018, diplomatic cables show.
With such disturbing evidence stacking up, Beijing is doubling down on its attempts to muddy the waters. Senior officials of the Communist regime are dishing out false narratives and conspiracy theories. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian even accused the U.S. Army of planting the virus in central China.
Meanwhile, the Wuhan virus leaves a trail of human suffering and economic destruction, killing more than 170,000 people worldwide. The pandemic has destroyed livelihoods and crushed businesses across the globe. The outbreak could wipe off $9 trillion worth of global economy, the D.C.-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects. It’s time for the world to tell China to stop playing games and start answering some serious questions about the origins of the contagion.
President Trump questions China’s coronavirus figures
[Cover image via YouTube]
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Comments
Of course thy will say that. China lied.
That’s the whole point of an independent investigation.
hasn’t the left in this country continually said that if you are not guilty, you have nothing to hide? Therefore, but that reasoning, China should have no fear about opening the lab to independent investigation!
The official China numbers of their infections and death defy logic. I find it hard to believe in a country about three times the population of the US, that they have such a low rate of infection and death. Most of their cities have population densities that make NYC look spacious. Yes, they locked down. Yes, their people aren’t quite as mobile. But the sheer density of population should have caused the virus to explode.
Let China return to its status pre-1973. Let the bastards starve.
I wish I could give you more than one up-tick.
I move that every upvote on this counts as ten more for MAJack’s comment.
I wish this would work. Sadly, this would be like a game of Survivor. The lower ends of the world powers totem pole will work with China to increase their competitive edge and gain leverage.
Bringing China into the world economy and allowing empowerment through theft and outright support (missile staging technology) hasn’t quite worked out well. Lenin’s statement about capitalists and rope is more applicable to the Chinese than Russians. Capitalist West has to outsource the rope from the ChiComs that is used to hang them.
It’s just the start of negotiations on the reparations due to the mishandling of SARSv2.
China isn’t going to do anything without a roadmap of where this might go.
I’ve noticed that China never presents a health official to help explain their situation. It’s always a spokesman from the foreign ministry or other functionary mouthpiece. Probably because anyone who knows anything has already been imprisoned or murdered. Is there an “Infector General” we should be questioning or is that also one of Flu Emperor Xi’s personal projects?
Al Capone tried to stop Eliot Ness from investigating him…
China’s being short-sighted. There must be some way it could corrupt the investigation and use it to steal more technology, hack more communications, and identify more people to silence and “re-educate”. Or maybe China knows that regarding those activities, there’s nothing left for it to do.
Some Chinese virology researcher crawled into a bat cave in a remote part of China. He or she emerged with virus in hand–but in the process was covered with bat blood, feces and urine. You really have to want to collect that virus to go through that.
Then it goes into a laboratory at Wuhan where it subsequently either escapes through negligence or is intentionally released.
Do you think that something is wrong with this story? The more ludicrous Chinese claim is that this virus came from the USA. Those bats don’t have the range to fly across the Pacific.
I’ve wondered if the lab that does bio-weapon R&D for China handed off a sample of the virus to a commercial/medical lab – knowing full well the comm/med lab wasn’t adequately prepared to handle it. Not unlike using their own people as mules to import the virus from safe containment to the general population. It would give the gov’t / military interests a kind of plausible deniability / excuse to blame the commercial labs for the outbreak.
I don’t believe the Wuhan BSL-4 lab (biological security level 4) does R&D into bioweapons. But apparently the Chinese military does control the entire facility.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8003713/China-appoints-military-bio-weapon-expert-secretive-virus-lab-Wuhan.html
Major General Chen Wei, the People’s Liberation Army’s leading biological and chemical warfare expert has spent a lot of time there as the Wuhan institute is one of only two facilities in China that conducts research into biochemical warfare. And when the Wuhan virus epidemic broke out they sent her there to help “contain” the outbreak. You don’t dispatch a Major General for that reason. That and other actions the Chinese government took indicates that they strongly suspect the virus came from that lab. MGEN Chen Wei has conducted research into SARS and coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, particularly after the SARS epidemic of 2003-2004. But that doesn’t imply the Chinese were developing this virus as a bioweapon. For several reasons.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology apparently has a teaching function, and students do work at the BSL-4. I’ve seen screen captures of various pages of their website and some of their students are obviously foreign. Definitely not Chinese. There is no way the PLA would allow foreign researchers inside their biochemical warfare programs.
Besides the Coronavirus simply isn’t lethal enough to be a biological warfare agent. Now that the USG and other researchers are conducting antibody testing it appears many more people have been exposed to the virus and never knew it. Or they thought they had some form of the flu. In the U.S. and other countries the death rate is a percentage of reported cases. If somebody doesn’t know they have it because they’re asymptomatic, or if they think they just have the flu, they’re not going to seek medical attention unless they develop severe complications. And the people who develop severe complications from the flu are the same people who are developing severe complications from the Wuhan virus. The elderly and people with compromised immune systems due to underlying health conditions.
Not the kind of people we try to recruit into the armed forces. So it’s not an effective battlefield weapon. I believe the mortality rate for Wuhan virus in the U.S. is below 2% and that’s of reported cases. So if far more people were infected by the virus but never reported it then the mortality rate is far less. And a great many people who sought medical attention may not have been killed by the virus. It’s just that a lot of places are attributing any deaths of people found to be infected to the virus. When the virus isn’t what killed them; they died with the virus, but not because of the virus. If you get cancer and it’s operable, and get the operation but later develop an infection and die from septic shock it wasn’t the cancer that killed you.
The average age of men in Israel who die with the Wuhan virus is between 79 and 80. The majority of the victims worldwide have been men. The average age in Italy is 80. When someone gets to be that age they are going to have underlying health conditions. Everybody that age does. To be blunt, many people that age would have died anyway even without the Wuhan virus.
So we’re getting a false picture about just how dangerous this virus is. But it is definitely not dangerous enough to be viable as a bioweapon.
I can certainly understand nerdy Chinese biologists crawling into bat caves to collect specimens. I was a nerdy biology kid in high school and early college. We went on a field trip into Mexican border towns in the middle of the night to collect house gekkos and Anole lizards. In one trip to a downtown area we saw a couple of knife fights one the way. And the University had a speleological society that went on trips to bat caves in central Texas, where we had to crawl over centuries of deposited bat guano. We didn’t smell so great when we returned. We also collected bat specimens from the cave mouths with tennis and badminton rackets and dumped the bodies into pillow cases. Science nerds are a universal type the world over.
They’ll respond to being squeezed. I’ve noticed an uptick in the Q&A section of Amazon products – the main question being “where is this made”. I’ve gone through our wish list and removed China manufactured goods. Not that I can totally escape that – but the question is now front most in my new purchase decisions.
Remember now you have to take off your list anything that says Made in Vietnam. For quite some time now, to get around the tariffs, communist China has been shipping Goods to Vietnam where all that is done is simply to stick a made-in-vietnam label on them.
My memory is hazy, but when I first began my career in the aerospace industry, it was in procurement. Every purchase order let by the company included a lengthy boilerplate terms and conditions document, which included anti-american and truth-in-manufacturing origin type requirements. At the time I was in the military/dod side of the company and so all purchase orders let were in satisfaction of mil/dod prime contracts. One of the functions we served by product inspection and testing upon receipt, was intercepting and preventing counterfeit parts and materials from getting into the production stream.
45 years later, I wonder what those purchase requirements look like now? We used to joke about “better faster cheaper” – pick any two. These days it just seems like “cheap and fast” is the requirement.
Waiting for the “China lied. People Died” chants. Maybe the souvenir t shirt as well.
It is a known fact that China cannot feed its own people. If the world stops trading with them then we will have leverage for the things that we want changed in our relations with them. Like, stealing intellectual property. Lying about almost everything. Spying and stealing a corporation’s data to interfere in our elections and political decisions. Making them pay for the death and damage done by there folly of mishandling this virus. No reform, no food!
They cannot afford to allow outside investigation. One or two of their misrepresentations might be able to be glossed over. The big picture is so compelling that we should all shun China. Shut down buying most of their products. That will eventually bring them to their knees.
Their conduct with most small countries is more or less like a loan shark.
Knowing rather this was an accidental release of CCP Virus, or intentional, does not matter as much as China’s other conduct. What matters is China’s broader conduct, which makes it very clear that their intentions are totally dishonorable.