The US is letting China off the hook over its COVID-19 coverup | TheHill

Further undermining the WHO s credibility, Tedros attended the Beijing Winter Olympics, despite a U.S.-led diplomatic boycott, and heaped renewed praise on China s COVID-19 handling. In fact, Tedros carried the Olympic torch in a relay that also prominently featured another torchbearer, a Chinese military officer who led the ambush killing of 20 Indian troops in June 2020 and who, in gross violation of the Olympic spirit, is now being feted by China as a national hero. Yet, thanks to Western support, Tedros s reelection in May has become a mere formality.

To Biden s credit, last May he helped end the long suppression of an open debate on a possible lab leak by calling that hypothesis one of two likely scenarios on how the pandemic originated. Until then, the hypothesis was treated as a pure conspiracy theory by major U.S. news organizations, social-media giants and some influential scientists who hid their conflicts of interest. Facebook and Instagram even suspended accounts that repeatedly referred to the virus s possible escape from a lab.

The concerted effort to obscure the truth also extended to U.S. scientific and bureaucratic institutions, largely because U.S. government agencies from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to USAID funded dangerous research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) from 2014 to 2020. The long suppression of a debate only aided China s designs, including giving it sufficient time to conceivably eliminate any incriminating evidence of its negligence or complicity in the worst disaster of our time.  

One key question remains unanswered: Why were official U.S. agencies funding research on viruses at the WIV, which, according to the U.S. government s own admission, was linked to the Chinese military? A January 2021 State Department fact sheet raised concern over whether any of our research funding was diverted to

via thehill.com

I always agreed with the old saw that much that looks like malice is just incompetence. But in this case, perhaps the ratio is more like 50/50.