CDC and other US government officials, on the other hand, must ratchet up their criticism of China as well as WHO. I agree with you there. It's alarming that there are so few PR ramifications for China. From the looks of it, either their unsanitary bushmeat consumption got the world sick, or their irresponsible laboratory containment procedures did. Both are a reflection of China's culture, and were only exacerbated by authoritarian crackdown upon the early warnings issued by Chinese medical professionals. The US government shouldn't defend bad practices and systemic problems in the name of multilateral cooperation. That variety of ethical blindness forgives bad faith from our counterparts and damages our hegemony.
I also don't understand why they even had the slighest faith in a reliable investigation. After all these months of pushing back on researching accessing the site, they still bowed to their whims. How does this help the argument that it's better to just suck it up?
One thing I am really interested in to read more on is a historians analysis of the parallels one can draw from the period rising up to World War 2, and more importantly, how the rest of the world acted back then. When Germany was dissolving all their democratic processes, and started labellling jews, what did the rest of the world do? What did their neighbours do? Did they just happily keep on conducting business?
I have read slightly into it, but placing the responses of the countries at that time in the right context really requires some solid knowledge of history. If anyone knows interesting articles to read about the responses of the world during that time: I'm very interested.
Might have something to do with the fact that the leader of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom, was hand picked by the Chinese communist party and won the position over the US and EU's favored choice.
Basically: "Oh, someone else can play the same game we've played for a century with UN, WHO, IMF, etc. - how dare they?"