China is on the defensive in a couple of areas as of late. One is the continued accusations of forced internment of the Muslim Uyghur population in the the Xinjiang province. They continue to claim that they are simply training in vocational schools, not being forcibly sterilized and raped. The other is the investigation of the origin of the COVID-19 virus that gave rise to the global pandemic.

The United States and allies have claimed that China exerted total control over every aspect of the investigation that the WHO conducted.

According to the WSJ report, the Chinese government had near-total control over the W.H.O. visit to Wuhan, from deciding who could be on the team to dictating what the visiting scientists were allowed to see. The government also forced the W.H.O. team to watch Chinese political propaganda instead of seriously digging into the early days of the pandemic.

The WSJ said it uncovered “fresh details about the team’s formation and constraints that reveal how little power it had to conduct a thorough, impartial examination – and call into question the clarity its findings appeared to provide.”

This is predictably being met with outrage by the Chinese. They have dredged up all kinds of experts to denounce the claims as conspiracies. They also try to put the “lab leak” theory to bed by bringing out the alternative theories of animal to human, and “cold chains” as being the more likely source.

The report, generated after WHO experts visited Wuhan, the Chinese city first reporting a COVID-19 case, dismissed the “lab-leak” conspiracy theory, and recommended transmissions between animals and humans, and transmissions through frozen food, which is consistent with what WHO experts said in a February conference in Wuhan. It also suggested the 7th Military World Games, which was held in Wuhan in October 2019, two months before the first case in this city was reported, is worth digging into.

In any case, it seems that the final WHO report will not answer the question of the origin of the virus as cleanly as the Chinese had hoped for. The answer from Chinese experts in the Global Times article is pretty straightforward:

Those Western countries only want WHO to pinpoint Wuhan as the origins of the virus, and better prove the virus was leaked from lab; if not, they just launched a smear campaign at China, said experts.

Are these experts in scientific fields, or smear campaigns? Just wondering.