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A local nurse (L) hands over work to a nurse from a Zhejiang provincial medical aid team at a hospital in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, March 18, 2020. /Xinhua
**Editor's note: **Andrew Korybko is a Moscow-based American political analyst. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.
An open letter by two dozen scientists calling for an "independent investigation" into coronavirus received global attention following the Wall Street Journal's report on their efforts earlier this month. The signatories claim that the World Health Organization (WHO)'s recent study into the origins of the virus was manipulated by the Chinese government, which they argue makes its findings inconclusive. Instead, they're lobbying the international community to commence a supposedly "independent investigation" according to the specific standards that they demand. The innuendo is that China is covering up COVID-19's true origins.
The average news consumer might have heard about their letter from media reports but probably didn't bother to actually read the document itself. Had they done so, then they'd have discovered that it's actually very deceptive. A truly independent study already took place, so what's really being proposed is a politicized investigation in order to push the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus might not only be man-made, but could have even escaped from a Chinese laboratory. The scientists explicitly speculate as much in their letter, which very strongly suggests that the findings of their so-called "independent investigation" are predetermined.
This is hypocritical since one of their criticisms is that the WHO's investigation was flawed from the get-go because "one international team member had expressed a strong conviction towards the pure zoonosis hypothesis before joining the investigation - when hardly any data about the SARS-CoV-2 virus were available - and was dismissive of the lab-related origins." That's not a valid criticism though since it was conspiratorial to imagine that coronavirus was a bioweapon, especially if one clings to that theory over a year after the outbreak despite the evidence disproving such speculation.
The logo at the World Health Organization (WHO) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. /Xinhua
Nevertheless, the open letter continues to imply that China covered up the virus origins. This is seen by the signatories' demand that the "independent investigation" includes experts on Chinese culture and language "who can help to interpret behaviors during the original events and also help decode the dynamic during the investigation itself." Their reference to relying on "open-source intelligence to help gather additional information" can result in CNN and other Western outlets' fake news reports being part of their predetermined conclusion aimed at legitimizing the coronavirus cover-up conspiracy theory.
In addition, their assertion that "half of the joint team convened under that process is made up of Chinese citizens whose scientific independence may be limited" deserves to be condemned. Scientists shouldn't be discriminated against based on their nationality, yet that's exactly what the signatories are doing. Their own criticism is ironically more applicable against themselves if one accepts their false thesis of national scientific discrimination as fact, since it can be just as easily argued that these Western scientists might also have "limited" scientific independence with some of their governments supporting coronavirus conspiracy theories.
Another point to be made is that the open letter's implied demands that China surrender all of its sovereign rights to the proposed "independent investigation" team are unrealistic. The scientists practically want to remove the host state's entire involvement from the study, thereby placing it at the mercy of the politicized participants. The latter concern is evident from their recommendation to "screen for conflicts of interest," which in the larger context of their letter strongly suggests that "experts" who don't pay credence to coronavirus conspiracy theories should be excluded from the "independent investigation."
The signatories surely wouldn't direct any of these same demands towards the U.S. when it comes to conducting a genuinely independent study under the WHO's auspices into COVID-19's uncontrollable spread within its borders even though that truly represents a global epidemiological threat. Upon contemplating all of these observations, it should become obvious to readers that the calls for an "independent" investigation are deceptively aimed at justifying predetermined conspiratorial conclusions intended to ruin China's reputation. This makes the open letter the exact opposite of science when it's actually a weapon of information warfare.
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