Leading U.S. infectious disease experts are warning that China’s rejection of a World Health Organization plan for another Covid-19 investigation inside the country threatens to deny the world critical data needed to identify and head off future pandemics.

And experts told POLITICO that the denial of access to Wuhan, the original epicenter of the virus outbreak, deepens growing suspicion the Chinese government is attempting to cover up the possibility that the virus was intentionally engineered.

“We have had already two coronavirus pandemics come out of China and it’s more likely than not will that we will have another coronavirus pandemic come out of China, so [a China-based probe] is our best chance to get our hands around how this gets out of bats and into humans,” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “We can’t do this without going to China. There is no way you can get to the bottom of this from 5000 miles away.”…

“I think what [WHO] asked was perfectly reasonable, ” said Osterholm, who argued that China’s rejection of the probe will fuel conspiratorial speculation about how the virus emerged in China. “It makes people suspect this is a manmade virus with an intentional release.”