China's Wuhan Cover-up Hardens West's Attitudes: No Longer 'Business As Usual'

China deserves some credit and appreciation in recent weeks for sending medical supplies and offering advice to other countries currently at the apex of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as countries emerge from the health crisis, the critical eyes of the world will focus on China’s handling of the pandemic in Wuhan, where it almost certainly began in late 2019.

In England, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was hospitalized and spent three days in an ICU ward before his release last Thursday before Easter. His temporary replacement, Dominic Raab, said it could no longer be “business as usual” with China, a strong indication that attitudes against the Communist giant were beginning to harden.

Raab said, “There’s no doubt we can’t have business as usual after this crisis. We’ll have to ask the hard questions about how it came about and how it could have been stopped earlier.”

Also heard was former British official, William Hague. He was once a former Tory leader and foreign secretary who now sits in the House of Lords. On Wednesday, he commented Britain cannot be dependent on China as it has shown it does not “play by our rules”.

A warning from the British parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee stated an orchestrated disinformation campaign by China was “costing British lives” during the battle against the coronavirus.

In a report, British lawmakers accused China of “obfuscating” what was happening when the outbreak began, when it could have played a key role in collecting valid data on its spread.

Amazingly, China continued to claim the evidence proving the outbreak started in Wuhan does not exist. The Chinese embassy in London said in a statement Monday that “there has been no scientific or medical conclusion” about the origin of COVID-19 and that tracing work was still ongoing.

The statement said, “The World Health Organization (WHO) has made repeated statements that what the world is experiencing now is a global phenomenon, the source is undetermined, the focus should be on containment and any stigmatizing language referring to certain places must be avoided.”

The WHO has been criticized for being favorable to China at the expense of other countries and even being part of the cover-up about the scope of the problems in Wuhan. They named the disease COVID-19 to replace the terms Wuhan and China in any reference to the disease that could be considered stigmatizing.

The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, expressed what he termed “grey areas” in China’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak. He told the Financial Times on Thursday things “happened that we don’t know about” and said, “Let’s not be so naive as to say it’s been much better at handling this” about China’s management of the outbreak.

The French leader continued, “We don’t know. There are clearly things that have happened that we don’t know about.”