Now the WHO demands answers from China on COVID? It’s too late

The World Health Organization’s initial 2021 “investigation” called the leak theory “extremely unlikely” — but the agency eventually disowned it. Shutterstock

Now the World Health Organization steps up pressure on China for crucial data on COVID’s origins?

Four years after the deadly disease first broke out in the fall of 2019, throwing the world into chaos and costing nearly 7 million lives?

And long after China likely destroyed all evidence suggesting the coronavirus came from one its labs?

What a tragic joke.

“We’re pressing China to give full access, and we are asking countries to . . . urge Beijing to cooperate,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus smugged of WHO’s note to Chinese officials seeking access to all relevant information and offering to send investigators.

A firm letter from WHO? They must be trembling in Beijing.

The data, if it still exists, would be critical to determining conclusively whether the virus had escaped from a Chinese lab — particularly the Wuhan Institute of Virology — or “jumped” directly from an animal to humans.

That knowledge four years ago might’ve helped the world’s response to the outbreak, and it’s essential to preventing another one even today.

Yet since Day One, Beijing has refused to provide comprehensive data; indeed, some info disappeared long ago.

And WHO officials actually heaped praise on Beijing, at least in the outset, labeling the regime’s transparency “very impressive and beyond words.”

Then-President Donald Trump was so outraged by its subservience to China that he withdrew US participation from WHO.

Naturally, President Joe Biden reversed that decision on his first day in office, and tapped Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’d fiercely stomped on the lab-leak theory, to head the US WHO delegation.

The WHO’s initial 2021 “investigation” called the leak theory “extremely unlikely” — but the agency eventually disowned it, since it had let Beijing hamstring it from the start.

Since then, mounting enormous evidence has indicated that the bug did, in fact, originate at the Wuhan lab — and US government officials increasingly see it as the most likely source.

And while the WHO has gradually stepped up its own calls for greater Chinese cooperation, it still won’t point its finger outright at Beijing — even though China’s coverup is itself proof that it’s trying to hide something.

If Ghebreyesus & Co. ever grow a spine and truly hold China to account, it could add weight to the case against Beijing for its disastrous, irresponsible behavior in connection with COVID.

Still, the WHO will never be able to make up for the damage it caused early on by giving China a pass as it blocked vital efforts to understand the new disease.