WASHINGTON: The chances of a deeper investigation on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic and holding Beijing accountable will depend a great deal on
, said Jianli Yang, a Chinese dissident and son of a former Communist Party leader, a former political prisoner in China, adding that he WHO is incapable of demanding transparency from the communist country regarding Covid-19.
Jianli, in an opinion article for The Hill, wrote that it is the lesson learned after the World Health Organization (WHO) team's visit to China produced no answers to key questions about how and where the coronavirus started.
"The WHO is still incapable of transparency regarding China and Covid-19," said the dissident.
"When the virus began to spread last year, allegations abounded that the
of Virology, which collected extensive virus samples, may have caused the outbreak by accidentally or deliberately leaking the virus into the community. China strongly rejected that possibility. The WHO team said the accidental laboratory leak hypothesis does not explain how the virus was introduced to the human population and indicated this is an area for future study. Unfortunately, this is akin to giving China a clean chit," he wrote.
The WHO team, post the trip, said that the initial findings suggest that the introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway and one that will require more studies and more specific targeted research.
"This obfuscates the fact that the virus was first identified in China and the only thing to be investigated is its origin there. When experts from 10 countries arrived in China on January 14, the Chinese government put limits on their research into the outbreak and prevented the WHO scientists from speaking with reporters," he wrote.