Mick Hartley

The Sunday Times has a front page investigation into the World Health Organisation, and its disastrous response to the coronavirus. 

Our investigation reveals today how a concerted campaign over many years by Beijing to grab power inside the WHO appears to have fatally compromised its ability to respond to the crisis. It raises serious concerns about the extent of Beijing’s influence over the WHO and its director-general, and how this undermined the organisation’s capacity — and willingness — to take the steps necessary to avert a global pandemic. Its leadership put China’s economic interests before public health concerns. The results have been nothing short of catastrophic.

It is a story that stretches back many years before the Covid-19 crisis. After being strongly criticised by the health agency for attempting to cover up the 2003 Sars crisis, China set out to increase its influence over the WHO. By applying financial and diplomatic leverage over some of the world’s poorest nations, Beijing won a global power struggle to get its favoured candidates installed at the very top of the organisation.

As a result, years later, a body that was set up with the lofty goal of “attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health” has been co-opted into aiding the Chinese state’s campaign for global economic dominance. Its leadership began to speak differently, espousing statements and pursuing policies that were markedly convenient to China — even praising Beijing’s questionable allies such as North Korea, despite its appalling health and human rights record.

Beijing had been instrumental in installing Tedros as the £170,000-a-year head of the agency by pulling strings and calling in favours during the 2017 election for the job.

Tedros himself caused outrage by bestowing the role of WHO goodwill ambassador on Robert Mugabe, the notorious former Zimbabwean dictator, an appointment said to have had strong backing by the Chinese government, a long-standing close ally of the despot.

As hospitals became flooded with patients in Wuhan in January 2020, the health agency repeatedly relayed to the world the Chinese government’s false claims that there was no evidence the virus could pass between humans. It made a specific point of cautioning countries not to impose bans on travel to and from the virus hotspots — which meant many weeks were lost before countries independently decided to seal their borders. The WHO’s approach ensured that China’s short-term economic prospects were protected. Meanwhile, the virus was allowed to spread round the globe like wildfire.

More recently, we can reveal, a backroom deal negotiated between the WHO and China has seriously damaged the chances of the world getting to the bottom of one of the most important questions facing mankind today: the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.

When the world’s nations gave Tedros the job of discovering how the virus first came to infect humans, his team struck an agreement in secret with China that emasculated the inquiry. It meant that the WHO’s “independent” mission — its fact-finding team travelled to Wuhan early this year to carry out an investigation — was, in the words of one expert, little more than a “shameful charade”. There may well be no second chance.

A catalogue of incompetence and dishonesty, then. It's nothing we hadn't suspected anyway, but it's salutary to see it all pulled together.

And the lab-leak hypothesis?

The Sars outbreak in 2003 is thought to have originated in bats in Yunnan province, southwest China, and to have been introduced into markets in the surrounding area through an intermediary host animal. Sars-CoV-2 is believed to have had similar beginnings because of its resemblance to other bat coronaviruses.

However, the caves in Yunnan province are more than a thousand miles from Wuhan, and no bats containing such viruses have ever been found near that city. If an intermediate animal, or indeed a human, had been infected by a bat in Yunnan, how could this very infectious virus be carried on such a long journey to Wuhan without causing a single noticeable outbreak along the way?

The Chinese had tested thousands of animals in Wuhan and the surrounding areas, but not one had come up positive for the virus. Chinese scientists had also rejected the suggestion that the virus entered through the Huanan seafood market in the city, which was connected to some of the cases in December 2019.

Extensive sample-testing at the market failed to show a link between any of the animals there and the virus. It was also clear that many of the early human cases had no link to the market, and the conclusion was that the market was a crowded environment in which the virus had spread, rather than the point of introduction into Wuhan.

But there was an elephant in the room. Coronaviruses found in the Yunnan bat caves, including the world’s closest known match to Sars-CoV-2, were being kept at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the time of the outbreak. To many it seemed a remarkable coincidence that, of all the 600 cities in China, the virus began in Wuhan, the home of an institute that houses the world’s largest collection of coronaviruses from wild bats and has a team of scientists who often travel to those same Yunnan caves.

The scientists had been seeking out coronavirus-infected bats and then transporting the viruses back to the laboratory in Wuhan. There they carried out highly controversial “gain of function” experiments to make the viruses more infectious to humans. The work was designed to help develop vaccines to pre-empt a potential coronavirus outbreak, but many scientists had warned that one safety lapse could itself cause a deadly pandemic.

Only a tiny handful of labs in the world carried out such high-risk experiments, and in 2018 inspectors sent by the US embassy in Beijing to the Wuhan institute had flagged serious safety concerns there. A US diplomatic cable leaked to The Washington Post stated: “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”

There were therefore questions about whether the pandemic had been caused by a leak from the Wuhan institute or one of its researchers who had been infected in the bat caves and then accidentally carried the virus back to the city. It was certainly not inconceivable: the Sars virus had leaked from the National Institute of Virology lab in Beijing in 2004. Nine people were infected by the outbreak and one died.

There were serious concerns about what the Wuhan institute had been doing with the world’s closest known match to the Covid-19 virus, which was the strongest lead in the hunt for the pandemic’s origin. It had been found eight years ago by Wuhan scientists in an abandoned mine, where it had been linked to deaths caused by a coronavirus-type respiratory illness. But the significance of the deaths had been kept secret by the Chinese authorities until a Sunday Times investigation uncovered them in the summer of last year. The lab has refused to answer questions on whether it was experimenting on the virus in the run-up to the pandemic.

Indeed China had been reluctant to address many questions about the pandemic’s origins since January 2020, other than to issue blanket denials. It did not want the ignominy of being found culpable for the world’s worst pandemic for a century.

It's a story, in other words, of Chinese obfuscation, with the collaboration of the WHO and a number of scientists who had reason to play down the significance of the gain-of-function research…