The World Health Organization is getting ready for its second investigation into the origins of COVID-19. If you were expecting it to be any better than the first, you should prepare to be disappointed.
The WHO’s new investigation team includes six people from the first investigation, which quickly absolved China of any wrongdoing, dismissing the possibility that the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in just four pages of its 313-page report.
Aside from the six holdovers, the new team also includes Dr. Christian Drosten, who signed on to letters declaring that it was a conspiracy theory to think the virus didn’t have a natural origin, and Yun-Gui Yang, who has defended China in state-run media and is the deputy director at the Beijing institute that oversees the Wuhan lab.
In case the questionable personnel choices aren’t bad enough, there is the looming reality that China will never agree to allow the WHO to look at anything that might be incriminating, and that the WHO and the broader United Nations aren’t going to pressure China to give its team any access.
There is little chance that this investigation does anything aside from meekly fall back to the same conclusion as the first shoddy effort. The WHO has done nothing to correct the flaws that plagued the first endeavor and has shown no willingness whatsoever to cross the Chinese Communist Party, even if it means not fulfilling its basic duties as an organization that is focused on global public health.
The WHO has shown itself to be almost completely useless since the start of the pandemic. There is no indication that this second investigation will be any more useful or truthful than anything else the bloated U.N. bureaucracy has done since COVID-19 started spreading in Wuhan. The only benefit that can be expected to come from this is that it will provide even more evidence that the organization is not worth the billions of dollars in U.S. funding it receives.
