While it is a given China will move heaven and earth to spike the guns of any independent international inquiry into the coronavirus crisis that doesn't mean one shouldn't be commissioned.
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The world owes at least this much to the almost 160,000 people already known to have died, and to the more than 2.4 million who have been infected so far.
It stands to reason, given the similarities between the origin and early trajectory of COVID-19, and of SARS almost two decades ago, this catastrophe did not have to be as bad as it has become.
SARS ended up infecting just over 8000 people. Of those a total of 774 died. This was despite the same issues with alleged cover-ups, mis-reporting and deliberate obfuscation by the Chinese government that have emerged in relation to COVID-19.
The key difference between the two is the way in which the World Health Organisation responded.
According to Michael Collins, a research associate for Asia Studies at the US-based Council on Foreign Relations, the then WHO director general, Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, took a very different approach to SARS than the one adopted by current DG, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, to COVID-19.
"(Dr Brundtland) made history by declaring the WHO's first travel advisory in 55 years which recommended against travel to and from the disease epicentre in southern China," Collins said.
"(He) also criticised China for endangering global health by attempting to cover up the outbreak".
Tedros, in stark contrast, praised China for a transparency that did not exist, criticised countries such as Australia that imposed travel bans, and made the mistake of believing what was coming out of Beijing.
In the case of SARS, WHO did not learn the genie had escaped the bottle until cases began popping up overseas; evidence impossible for China to deny.
The situation with COVID-19 was very different. Taiwanese health authorities sent medical teams to Wuhan in December. They confirmed human-to-human transmission at a time the Chinese, and WHO, were denying it was happening.
It has been strongly suggested Tedros, whose election in July 2017 was facilitated by China, was influenced by that nation's increasing contributions to the health body.
While these are still well short of the hundreds of millions of dollars America has controversially suspended, they have increased by 52 per cent since 2014 to US$86 million.
The day after his election as DG in mid-2017 Tedros told Chinese state media he, and WHO, would continue to support the "one China policy", meaning Taiwan is off the organisation's mailing list.
All of these are compelling reasons in support of Foreign Minister, Marise Payne's strongly worded view that WHO should not be the one to conduct any post-COVID-19 post mortem. "It's a bit poacher and gamekeeper," she said.
The impossibility of coming up with a structure that could elicit co-operation from Beijing is the biggest stumbling block.
While it is generally accepted a wide ranging, and fully independent, inquiry which looks at all aspects of the crisis is undertaken, the $64 billion dollar question of how to go about it has yet to be answered.
The impossibility of coming up with a structure that could elicit some form of co-operation from Beijing is going to be the biggest stumbling block.
Unless that cooperation is forthcoming, any investigative commission is doomed to do little more than expose cover-ups and lies.
