British Beat Away on Drums for Anti-China War

May 1, 2020 (EIRNS)—Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States, Dame Karen Pierce, told the Washington Post’s David Ignatius on April 29 that “there certainly needs to be some sort of review/investigation into how the [corona]virus got started” in China. “This is the third virus, I think, to come out of China before the century is a quarter old.”

Yesterday, the Queen’s last colonial governor over Hong Kong, Lord Chris Patten, jumped into the mix, sending a letter to U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab seeking his “assurance that the British government will press for an expert mission to Wuhan and will encourage other countries to do the same.” Patten took the opportunity to also insist on greater Foreign Office pressure on Beijing over its alleged violations of “rule of law” in Hong Kong.

Back in London, British officials announced that as of April 25, Chinese COVID-19 death statistics will no longer be included in the daily global death comparison issued at the No. 10 Downing Street daily briefings, because Chinese data are considered unreliable. (The argument in vogue on both sides of the Atlantic is that it is simply impossible that there could be fewer deaths in China than in most Western countries.)

Tory Member of Parliament Tom Tugendhat, the unvirtuous founder a few days before of an anti-China caucus, the “China Research Group,” welcomed the decision: “This data is used to judge the effectiveness of our own response, whether good or bad. It’s important we are comparing like with like, otherwise our own responses could be distorted leading to more deaths in the U.K.... Clearly No. 10 [home of the Prime Minister] believes the same as the rest of the world—that China’s data is unreliable and possibly false.”