For those who believe talk is cheap, this recent interview with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan by Fox News correspondent Chris Wallace regarding what the Biden administration will do to hold China accountable for COVID-19, will heartily reinforce that notion. “What Joe Biden did in Europe this week was rally the democratic world to speak with a common voice on this issue for the first time since COVID broke out,” Sullivan declared. “President Trump wasn’t able to do it. President Biden was. He got the G-7 to endorse a statement saying in unison that China must allow an investigation to proceed within its territory.” And if they don’t? “Either they will allow, in a responsible way, investigators in to do the real work of figuring out where this came from,” he warned, “or they will face isolation in the international community.”

First, note that that would be another investigation, one engendered 15 months after a virus that originated in China turned the entire world upside down. The initial investigation was a complete fraud, conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO), which gave China complete veto power over which American scientists could join it. Beijing vetoed all three scientists nominated by the U.S., but allowed Peter Daszak to join the effort instead.

That would be the same Peter Daszak who helped organize a letter published in The Lancet medical journal — a letter in which Daszak and 27 other “scientists” all denounced the lab leak claim as a “conspiracy theory” that did nothing “but create fear, rumors, and prejudice that jeopardize our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.”

Lapdog American journalists dutifully echoed that assessment, ridiculing anyone who even suggested the virus originated in a lab, while their Big Tech collaborators censored and suppressed all references to same. Now that (some of) these rank propagandists have recanted, Americans can expect them to be held as “accountable” as China — as in not at all.

Why the pessimism? Because while Sullivan talks the isolation talk, no one walks the isolation walk, including Congress. Speaking at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference last Friday, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) of undermining the effort to discover the origins of COVID. “Pelosi won’t do it,” he stated, before insisting the GOP was the antidote to such machinations. “When we’re in the majority we will do it, and we will hold China accountable,” he added. “[Democrats] are covering for China right now. It’s a Soviet-style cover-up. We’re going to keep calling them out on it.”

Apparently, Scalise doesn’t get out much. On May 27, the Senate voted to adopt a measure that cuts U.S. tariffs on hundreds of products imported from China. And Scalise’s assertion that the sellout of American interests is confined to one side of the aisle is completely bogus: The vote was a lopsided 91-4 in favor of accommodating a nation that killed more Americans than WWII.

In short, “business as usual” trumps all other considerations. Even when that business includes the rampant stealing of intellectual property, the continuing facilitation of Chinese espionage in America’s colleges and universities, and the accommodation of Big Tech, Hollywood, and the panoply of other equally contemptible globalist interests that “transcend” patriotism, national security, and simple common decency.

As for the so-called investigation, a bill introduced by Senators Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Susan Collins (R-ME) would establish a commission that looks into the origins of the virus. How serious is that effort? Included among the list of items the commission would investigate is the “uneven effect” the pandemic has had on minorities.

Moreover, the nations that compose the G7, which Biden allegedly got to “speak with a common voice,” are equally feckless. Despite all their rhetoric about getting tough with China, EU leaders blocked efforts to hold China accountable for using slave labor in Xinjian, with the final version of G7 communiqué expressing “concern” about slave labor and calling on communist thugs “to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, especially in relation to Xinjiang and those rights, freedoms and high degree of autonomy for Hong Kong enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Basic Law.”

That would be the same Hong Kong where the government has eliminated protests, arrested democracy activists, overhauled the election system, and is currently in the process of shutting down the pro-democracy paper Apple Daily.

If the Chinese communists are intimidated by Western “resolve,” they have a funny way of demonstrating it.

CNN anchor Dana Bash apparently noticed. She also spoke with Sullivan last Sunday, and was far more skeptical than Wallace. “China is stonewalling an investigation and you said we just can’t take this lying down,” Bash stated. “What does that mean in practical terms? If China won’t allow access, will the U.S. consider action against China to increase the pressure?”

Sullivan punted. “We are not, at this point, going to issue threats or ultimatums,” he responded. “What we’re going to do is continue to rally support in the international community and if it turns out that China refuses to live up to its international obligations, we will have to consider our responses at that point and we will do so in concert with allies and partners.”

And so in the space of half a day, “isolating” China becomes “rallying support” and consideration of responses “in concert with our allies.”

How “threatened” does China feel? Last week, the Chinese Academy of Sciences nominated the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) for its Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement Prize. Shi Zhengli, a.k.a. “Bat Woman,” and Yuan Zhiming, director of the WIV’s Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, were singled out for their “achievements.” Moreover, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry asserted the WIV should be awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine. Adding insult to injury, Shi Zhengli stated in an interview with the New York Times that “bat viruses in China could be studied in BSL-2 labs because there was no evidence that they directly infected humans.”

The Times further noted that several scientists want the investigation of the virus’s origins to transcend politics, borders, and individual scientific achievements. “This has nothing to do with fault or guilt,” insisted David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University.

Nothing to do with fault or guilt? The bet here is that the families and friends of more than 600,000 dead Americans — along with the millions of Americans devastated by job losses, business failures, school closings, delayed health treatments, vaccine mandates, and the increasingly totalitarian machinations of government officials — might disagree.

Infuriatingly, none of their concerns are likely to matter for the simplest of reasons: While the lives and livelihoods of workers worldwide were decimated to the tune of $3.7 trillion dollars in losses during the pandemic, the billionaire class became $5.1 trillion richer. And since much of that wealth was accumulated by doing business with China, the idea that China will “face isolation in the international community” is utterly laughable.

Last year Mark Alexander wrote that then-President Donald Trump should “send Xi Jinping the bill for the ChiCom Virus pandemic damages. But, every "investigation” into the origins of the Chinese virus will likely resemble police investigations of gambling at Rick’s Cafe in “Casablanca.”