Here's the situation in Australian Universities: successive governments have reduced funding and encouraged unis to develop their own revenue streams - namely foreign students.

At The University of Melbourne, which consistently ranks among the top two or three unis in Australia, foreign students make up 38.7% of all students on campus. Several other unis are operating with 50% foreign students.

An estimated 50% of these students are from China though universities don't release breakdown figures by country. The above linked Financial Times article estimates that Chinese students contribute $410 million to Melbourne University's coffers each year and $534 million to Sydney University. This amounts to 16% of all revenue at Melbourne uni and 23% at Sydney. As such, it raises questions over transparency as well as the morality of the industry in terms of degrees being for sale - even when academic standards are not me.

"According to Professor Babones, who teaches sociology at the University of Sydney: "Some students don't read and write English well enough and don't understand what to do.
"It's an unspoken but widely understood rule in humanities and social sciences that we are expected to help students pass. Or at least not expected to be failing them.
"People are getting degrees who probably shouldn't.""

For China, which flaunts its power to turn this income stream off or on, common sense tells you it wants something for its money. Couple that with numerous reports of CCP infiltration of major universities across Australia and NZ in terms of funding think-tanks, monopolizing student bodies, intimidating critics and you have a serious in-place foreign power block operating in Australian universities.

So all this needs to be factored in when you see academics, be they from WHO or universities coming out supporting the CCP's position regarding the source of the virus.

I want to take a closer look at one of those papers purporting to 'debunk the lab origin theory' such as Dan mentioned in this light - i'll do that in the next post.

Edit: It's not the next post - it was split to different thread here.