We are a month into the 90-day deadline the Biden administration set for a report into the origins of COVID-19.
The White House lowered the report’s expectations to Marianas Trench levels, saying that it might not produce a definitive explanation.
Spy agencies conducting the review have yet to find conclusive evidence that would settle the debate over whether the virus came from human contact with an infected animal or was leaked from a Chinese government virology lab, a person familiar with the efforts said.President Biden is due to receive a 45-day update in mid-July, and administration officials said that even partial progress might narrow differences among scientists, politicians and intelligence experts and turn up clues for further investigation.Mr. Biden “is mindful of the fact that after 90 days we may not have an absolutely definitive answer, but he wanted a focused, intense, time-bound effort,” a senior administration official said.
I suspect our spy agencies may be too busy scanning the social media of Trump supporters or chasing after garage door pulls instead of infiltrating China’s military-scientific research complex. And Biden’s ability to “focus” is questionable, even on his good days.
Our media will no doubt circle the wagons around the Biden team’s weak efforts. It appears they’ll blame China’s unwillingness to cooperate, as indicated by an op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times.
Chinese scientists are great scientists, but they work for an authoritarian government where politics, not facts, always come first. If information they know or discover makes China look bad, it is dangerous to say it — especially to foreign colleagues, especially publicly, and, often, even to their friends or family.That may sound familiar after the Trump years, when the president often mocked and sidelined experts like Fauci. But the risk for scientists in China is far worse: loss of your job and your kids’ career prospects, visits by the police, false accusations, even prison.As the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, reminded his scientists in a speech last year. “Science has no borders, but scientists have a motherland.”
Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers are demanding an investigation into the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan. Athletes who competed at the event complained of COVID-like symptoms and described the city as a ‘ghost town’ weeks before authorities officially admitted any disease outbreak.
Almost 10,000 international competitors from 100 countries took part in what is known as the ‘military Olympics’ in October 2019, two months before Beijing confirmed they were treating patients with an ‘unknown pneumonia’.But today the city is at the center of concerns the virus leaked from a virology lab triggering fresh calls for investigators to examine claims that athletes fell ill.’One athlete from Luxembourg reported “nearly empty” streets in Wuhan during the games, recalling, “It was a ghost town” and “There were rumors that the government warned the inhabitants not to go out,”‘ wrote Rep. Mike Gallagher in a letter to the Pentagon first reported by the Washington Post.’While anecdotal, these reports raise important questions about the timeline of the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.’
Furthermore, British scientists have published a report pointing to an October 2019 start to the pandemic with the epicenter in Wuhan.
Researchers from Britain’s University of Kent used methods from conservation science to estimate that SARS-CoV-2 first appeared from early October to mid-November 2019, according to a paper published in the PLOS Pathogens journal.The most likely date for the virus’s emergence was Nov. 17, 2019, and it had probably already spread globally by January 2020, they estimated.China’s first official COVID-19 case was in December 2019 and was linked to Wuhan’s Huanan seafood market.
I would recommend that anyone in the administration who wishes to truly help Americans start preparing for China’s next biological release from one of its planned 25-to-30 high-level bioresearch facilities. This event is likelier to occur than China cooperating in any meaningful way on the origins of this pandemic.
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