The Communists are unusually upset with Washington. Their complaint this week?

The Biden administration’s directive to the U.S. intelligence community to produce a report within 90 days on evidence as to the source of the original 2019 COVID-19 outbreak. The point bears close attention in light of rising suspicion in Congress, especially among Republican legislators, that the virus may have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

This is not a silly conspiracy theory. It is already known that the WIV was engaged in Coronavirus-related research. It is also known that the U.S. State Department reported concerns that the WIV lacked safeguards to mitigate the risk of a bioleak. Further, as I’ve noted, U.S. intelligence also shows that the Chinese government engaged in a cover-up to delete records pertaining to WIV staff prior to, during, and following the COVID-19 outbreak. It didn’t want the world to know what these staff we’re working on. Add to this the Wall Street Journal’s recent reporting that three WIV staff members required hospitalization after becoming ill in the Fall of 2019.

Put simply, even if the full picture is not yet clear, we now have sufficient open-source evidence to suggest that COVID-19 may have leaked from the WIV. We certainly have enough evidence to demand further investigations into the WIV.

On paper, this U.S. investigation shouldn’t concern the Communists. After all, they insist that the virus had nothing to do with the WIV and that there is no evidence to suggest otherwise. Instead, they sometimes blame the virus on a leak from a Wuhan wet market. Other times they make absurd suggestions that the virus was being secretly researched at the U.S. Army’s Fort Detrick facility and then somehow transported itself 7,500 miles to Wuhan. Regardless, if the Communists are so utterly confident that the virus did not come from the WIV, why are they so reticent to allow World Health Organization access to that facility?

Zhao Lijian offered no answers from the Foreign Ministry rostrum on Thursday. Instead, Zhao insisted that the U.S. is being “being disrespectful to science, irresponsible to people’s lives, and counter-productive to concerted global efforts to fight the virus.”

This hyperbolic complaint is untrue, of course. Considering that COVID-19 has taken more than 3.5 million lives, decimated much of the global economy – especially for lower-paid workers – and disrupted humanity’s ability to socialize and engage normally, the U.S. government has a right and responsibility to ask questions as to the virus’ origins. The WHO’s pathetic record, thus far, setting itself only as a useful footstool for the Communists in terms of establishing COVID-19′s origins, only reinforces the justification for a serious investigation.

Of course, it’s completely possible that the virus had nothing to do with the WIV. It’s that the case, any investigation that establishes it should be publicly declared without delay. But investigations cannot be considered serious if they simply defer to a regime that has no regard for anything but its own subjective truths. And once again, the question must be asked: if the Communists have nothing to hide, why won’t they provide access to the facilities and individuals that would prove their innocence?

Zhao and his colleagues have no good answers. Instead, they whine like children that they are being treated unfairly. Unfortunately for them, the world isn’t in the mood to listen.

(Tom Rogan, Washington Examiner foreign policy writer)

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