The Kowtow
The latest political maneuvers in the search for truth about COVID’s origins
Beijing, China. February 9, 2021
During the 19th Century, British and American captains who wanted to trade in China had to kowtow on hands and knees and bump their heads on the floor before doing business with their Chinese overlords.
This galled the British who felt they represented the greatest nation on earth and Americans who felt they had rid themselves of such fealty, but both felt it was simply the cost of doing business in China.
On February 9, 2021 the World Health organization kowtowed again to the Chinese government. But this time it was at a three-hour press conference where the foreign inspectors agreed point-by-point with Beijing’s narrative.
Marion Koopmans from the Netherlands said that future investigations should look for evidence that the virus was circulating outside China prior to the Wuhan outbreak. She was backed up by Dr. Liang Wannian, the head of the delegation of Chinese scientists.
Dr. Peter Daszek from Great Britain reiterated his contention that the virus had emerged from bats through an as yet unidentified amplifier organism and that that organism had somehow been transported a thousand miles north to Wuhan’s seafood market. All this despite the fact that no viruses had been found in any of the animals in the market and that there were cases of Covid-19 in China prior to the cluster that appeared to have been associated with the Wuhan market.
Daszek had a longstanding interest, if not a conflict of interest, in this particular theory. It was his nonprofit organization Eco-Health that had channeled NIH funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to do the controversial gain of function research by injecting viruses into ferrets and humanized mice.
Dr. Ben Embarek took a departing shot at the idea that the virus could have come about because of an innocent mistake made in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, saying, “It was very unlikely that anything could escape from such a place.”
But that had never been the issue. Nobody had said that some viruses had somehow floated out on their own but that one for more technicians had been infected and transferred to the nearby Union Hospital where they had infected the original 41 patients.
But the kowtow had been completed and face had been saved. Necessary because China was a member of the World Health Organization in good standing and it was crucial to world health that the West continue to have a close working relationship with China in order to be able to detect and design vaccines against yearly flus and future pandemics.
If that required a bit of ritual obeisance so be it. Hopefully more forthright private diplomacy was going on behind closed doors.
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