The world has entered the fifth year since the COVID-19 breakout in China in late 2019, which was seen as a bio-warfare by military experts. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) experts doing a global scientific study to get to the bottom of the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus are still groping in the dark.
Experts place the cause of the delay in the WHO investigation at China’s doorstep, as Beijing is reluctant to provide the experts’ team access to its raw data and research laboratories that could help the global body arrive at any conclusive decision on the exact cause of the pandemic.
While the global landscape may have transformed monumentally because of the pandemic, the questions surrounding the genesis of the virus continue to loom large, shrouded in a veil of secrecy, uncertainty, and geopolitical complexities.
As long as Beijing continues hindering this process of uninterrupted access to the required data, it fuels multiple conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19, notably ones that hold China directly responsible for the outbreak, particularly the one that cited the leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
China has stonewalled information sharing and data access from the very onset of the pandemic. Mid-December 2019 marked the emergence of Coronavirus in Wuhan, with an increasing number of cases reported from the province.
However, only the rapidly spreading epidemic and its severity reported inside China forced the Director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, George F. Gao, to share limited information with his American counterpart, Robert Redfield.
The information censorship, limited measures to contain the epidemic, and allowing the outflux of people from Wuhan to other cities of China, especially foreigners, resulted in its swift snowballing into a global health crisis of unparalleled proportions in recent history.
Consequently, this limited information from China delayed the decision-making of WHO, which acknowledged the severity of the situation in January 2020 by designating it as a public health emergency of international concern.
However, the epidemic had traveled fast and wide by then, from China to every region and sub-region. It not only crumbled the healthcare systems across countries, leaving over seven million people dead in the months ahead but also wrought economic turmoil that the world is still recovering from four years later.
