Pros and cons of investigating China for the virus

The credibility of the eastern power is in question. Already, a considerable number of countries have cast doubt on China's action in relation to the coronavirus that has caused the most serious global health and economic crisis in the last century. The demands for an investigation to determine where the virus came from and how it was treated by the Chinese government at an early stage have prompted the Asian giant, which sees the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom speculating on the possibility of investigating where the pathogen originated. 

But signs are not clear enough to support this demand for inquiries against China. A publication in Nature containing the most applauded scientific research to date, which absolutely confirms the natural origin of COVID-19, ruled out any of the conspiracy hypotheses in early April: that it was created as a biological weapon to reduce the world's population, or that it was an experiment developed in Wuhan to reduce China's elderly population, or even the theory of a fatal error, according to which someone would have dropped a test tube in the city which has been ground zero for the pandemic. Much less the hypothesis spread in China that U.S. soldiers brought the virus to the outbreak region during a military sports tournament last fall. 

China, through the mouth of its vice foreign minister, has already made it clear that it will not accept its scientists or public officials sitting in any dock before the world's press, victims of a presumption of guilt. And he has mentioned the words that no one wants to hear, cold war, to explain the consequences of putting those responsible for the origin of this pandemic in the hands of a Hague-style criminal court. 

China's power in global markets is quite remarkable, and Beijing has begun to use this as a threat in the face of a possible investigation. The Australian Government has already been warned that imports of wine and meat from our antipodes will be cancelled if Scott Morrison's government persists in its proposal to open a process of clarification of the true origin of the infection. An international investigation could leave China exposed to world public opinion if negligence is shown in providing official information on the virus and on the drastic measures to stop its spread. Stigmatisation of the country would not help to pacify the trade war which, at the moment, is being waged against the United States alone, but which would spread to other Western countries that would be looking for those responsible. 

In the case of Germany, the warning has been even more sibylline: according to a press release from Reuters a few days ago, Merkel's government promised Chinese diplomats to always speak positively about China's role in the coronavirus crisis. Now that Berlin has joined the chorus of voices calling for an investigation, its commitment to prevent the communist country's image from being compromised has been revealed. What is unlikely is that the World Health Organization (WHO) will undertake such an "independent" investigation. There are too many links between its current leaders and a dictatorship that has lavished money on the multinational health institution, which is at the epicentre of Washington's criticism, caricatured by the American president's actions. 

The demand for clarity from China is, however, mandatory. What has happened cannot be resolved without China convincing the international community that it has taken transparent, responsible and scientifically sound measures. And it must clarify whether the deadlines within which action was taken were really due to the actual infection times, or whether the Chinese Government took too long to respond to an infection that was initially hidden from the eyes of the rest of the planet. The strategy of the Chinese authorities until now has been to convince us that they are equally harmed by an illness of natural origin, but either by manipulation of the incidence figures or by the diligence of their decisions, the effects they have suffered are less than those recorded in other countries of the world such as Spain, Italy or the United States.