Boy, I gotta say, this is, well actually it's more or less completely unsurprising:
The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly shelved the second phase of its much-anticipated scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China, Nature has learned. ...
In January 2021, an international team of experts convened by the WHO travelled to Wuhan, China, where the virus that causes COVID-19 was first detected. Together with Chinese researchers, the team reviewed evidence on when and how the virus might have emerged, as part of phase one. The team released a report in March that year outlining four possible scenarios, the most likely being that SARS-CoV-2 spread from bats to people, possibly through an intermediate species. Phase one was designed to lay the groundwork for a second phase of in-depth studies to pin down exactly what happened in China and elsewhere.
But two years since that high-profile trip, the WHO has abandoned its phase-two plans. "There is no phase two," Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told Nature. The WHO planned for work to be done in phases, she said, but "that plan has changed". "The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins," she said.
The "politics across the world?" Um, I think we're all pretty aware of what you're implying there, Ms. Kerkhove. It's not "politics" that stymied your investigations, it was...
Now, Maria Van Kerkhove herself sharply criticized the implications of this report:
But the article — which remains uncorrected as of Wednesday afternoon — seems to make it pretty clear what's going on here:
Researchers are undertaking some work to pin down a timeline of the virus's initial spread. This includes efforts to trap bats in regions bordering China in search of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2; experimental studies to help narrow down which animals are susceptible to the virus and could be hosts; and testing of archived wastewater and blood samples collected around the world in late 2019 and early 2020. But researchers say that too much time has passed to gather some of the data needed to pinpoint where the virus originated.
"Too much time has passed" to figure out if the sloppy, underfunded, unsecured, dangerous coronavirus lab in Wuhan was the place where the outbreak originated?
Somehow I don't think that's true.
If we don't make the effort to figure that out, it's not a problem of "time" or "politics," it's a problem of will and determination.
