Covid-19: Scientific consensus or conspiracy theory? WHO report

Editor’s note: CGTN’s First Voice provides instant commentary on breaking stories. The daily column clarifies emerging issues and better defines the news agenda, offering a Chinese perspective on the latest global events.

The long-awaited World Health Organization (WHO) report into the origins of Covid-19 confirms existing scientific consensus that the virus is most likely of a zoonotic origin, having crossed the species barrier from animals to humans. This further discredits a conspiracy theory pushed by the previous Trump administration and its supporters that the virus originated in a laboratory leak.

The Biden presidency has toned down the anti-China vilification weaponized by their predecessors amid a surge in Asian hate crimes across the country.

However, it has nonetheless continued to politicize the virus at large, rejecting the WHO’s findings and demanding “transparency” – with Secretary of State Antony Blinken pouring doubt over its “methodology.”

Even well over a year after the pandemic started, and with vaccine rollouts under way, certain voices continue to deliberately opt for politics above facts in speculating over the origins of Covid-19, despite many doing so having no qualifications on the matter whatsoever, and dismissing evidence on the value of its geopolitical worth and embarrassment to China, as opposed to its merits.

The goal is to make Beijing appear politically culpable. This is a phenomenon which has far exceeded the Trump administration.

While certain individuals such as Mike Pompeo and Matthew Pottinger have been notorious for spreading the “laboratory theory,” the Western mainstream media have also played to this tone, seeking to sow doubt by exploiting divisions among WHO scientists and investigators, dismiss established findings and play up dissenting views that seek to discredit the work of the organization overall.

The WHO has suffered extensively due to this politicization of its work at Washington’s behest, which now sees all findings which do not convey the “favourable” or “assumed” narrative to U.S. preferences as being politically and morally compromised.