May 29 — This week the level of attacks on China regarding its success against COVID-19 has been elevated to a fever pitch. The Biden administration has all the major U.S. media in tow.
A pack of Cold War-style lies targeting a laboratory in Wuhan, China, has been picked up and made “credible” by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, National Public Radio and others. Headlines across the internet refer to a previously discredited theory conjured up by the Trump administration as having “gone mainstream.”
When viewed in the context of the growing U.S. military presence near China’s territorial waters, the ratcheting up of propaganda is ominous.
Until recently, the anti-China slanders about the Wuhan lab and other lies and attacks have been kept alive by an exclusively right-wing cast of characters led by Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and including the likes of Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas — who had also called for sending in troops to put down and “quarter” [kill] Black Lives Matter protesters — and others.
China, with four times the population of the U.S., held its death toll from the coronavirus to less than 5,000 through a “people’s war” against the virus that showcased the superiority of socialist planning over the anarchy of capitalism. Trump and his team used attacks on China to try to distract from the fact that his administration allowed the pandemic to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the U.S.
The conspiratorial “lab leak” theory that became a central part of Trump’s narrative has now been revived with the support of Joe Biden’s White House. The theory goes that the origin of the virus that causes COVID-19 was not natural but created by researchers in the Wuhan Institute for Virology (WIV) laboratory and then leaked in an accident. In some versions it was unleashed in a purposeful germ warfare attack.
No one in Wuhan lab had COVID
All of the recent hype is anchored on a “fact sheet” penned by Trump’s vile neo-Cold Warrior, former Secretary of State Pompeo. Pompeo referenced U.S. intelligence “information” that claimed WIV staff were sickened and hospitalized in November 2019, a month before the earliest known case of COVID-19.
The story isn’t substantiated in any way. All of the staff at the Wuhan Institute were tested and there was no presence of COVID antibodies in anyone. This simple fact shows the lab leak hypothesis to be a sham.
There have been two delegations sent to Wuhan by the World Health Organization (WHO) to research the origin of the virus. The first was early in the pandemic and the second was in March of this year. Both concluded that the virus likely jumped from bats to an intermediary animal and then to humans, and that the lab leak theory was “highly unlikely.”
During the Trump administration, major media had to some extent been dismissive of the slanderous attacks and had treated its propagators as peddlers of a precarious conspiracy theory. But the tone began to change as Biden’s new Secretary of State Antony Blinken signaled that the diplomatic assaults on China would continue unchanged from the previous Trump administration.
This week the floodgates opened, and it was an all-out media assault on China. On May 27, Biden ordered further “investigation” into the origin of the virus — not by scientists but by the same spy agencies that fabricated the infamous “weapons of mass destruction” story used to justify the horrible U.S. war against Iraq in the George W. Bush era.
Wuhan lab leading virus research globally
The WIV lab has been a global leader in research on coronaviruses. Since the first SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2003, it has collected hundreds of viral samples from bats to further the study of how viruses mutate and what mutations may create a higher possibility of transfer to humans. The hope is that the research could help in the development of vaccines and allow scientists to gain an edge in fighting future pandemics.
The lead scientist at the WIV is Zhengli Shi, famously known as the Bat Woman for her devotion to this field of study.
The New York Times’ contribution to the slander includes an exceptionally long article written by its disgraced former science reporter Nicholas Wade. Wade was the subject of an anti-racist outcry over his 2014 book that drew on the white-supremacist Bell Curve theory. That hasn’t stopped the Times from trotting him out from time to time, and they tapped him to help push the current attacks on China.
Wade accuses National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Anthony Fauci of helping China in a supposed coverup of a lab leak. He hangs his hat on the fact that the intermediate animal that is crucial to the natural origin hypothesis hasn’t been found, citing the quick success in doing so only in the SARS and MERS outbreaks, even though it took much longer to trace that pathway and identify the intermediary animal in many other viral outbreaks. In his claim that WIV researchers created the virus, he attributes scientific abilities to the researchers that just don’t exist.
The journal Science published a letter by a group of 18 scientists also trying to give credibility to the lab leak theory. All of the scientists are from imperialist countries or other countries that have already been taking part in the U.S.-led hostility toward China.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington posted a response to Biden’s call for investigation that said: “Some political forces have been fixated on political manipulation and the blame game.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian has demanded an investigation into the work conducted at the U.S. biolab in Ft. Detrick, Md., which is surrounded by secrecy. Zhao said that Biden’s order showed that the U.S. “does not care about facts and truth, nor is it interested in serious scientific origin tracing.”
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