Does the deadly virus come from the Chinese laboratory in Wuhan? A flare-up discussion puts increasing pressure on Joe Biden.
What the ardent Trumpist Lauren Boebert said a few days ago at a congressional hearing is not really surprising: “Yes, you are right, President Trump was in office when the Covid virus came out of a laboratory in China, from the Wuhan laboratory, was released. And he tried to make it very clear that it came from China, and reporters have regularly dismissed that.”
But even in the more moderate media, such statements can suddenly be heard. There was an “overwhelming eagerness” to discredit the Wuhan lab virus theory after former US President Donald Trump made the claim, said Rita Panahi, a Sky News anchor.
Trump was right; the coronavirus came from the laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan; Democrats and many media have wrongly discredited the ex-president – there is a reason why this actually old story has been rehashed by Republicans in the USA for a few days. And it is becoming an ever-growing political problem for American President Joe Biden. Because he and his staff cannot find any clear answers to the theory.
The laboratory hypothesis gets support
The scientific guesswork about the cause of Covid-19 is still not over. But according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the responsible US Department of Energy is said to have determined that the corona virus most likely accidentally escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
Shortly thereafter, FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed the US domestic intelligence agency’s view in an interview with Fox News: “The FBI has assumed for some time that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential laboratory incident in Wuhan,” Wray said. “You’re talking about a potential leak at a Chinese government-controlled laboratory.”
No consensus in the Biden administration
The problem for the Biden government is that it has not yet been able to make its own clear assessment. To this day, the White House is poking around in the fog. In several press statements, both the Coordinator of Strategic Communications for the National Security Council, John Kirby, and Ned Price, the spokesman for the US State Department, repeated the following sentences:
“There is currently no consensus in the US government as to how exactly Covid started,” Kirby admitted. There is simply no consensus in the various secret services. “There’s a variety of views within the intelligence community,” Ned Price said. There are also services that have come to different conclusions than the laboratory thesis. “And there are some who say they just don’t have enough information to make a firm assessment of the origins of Covid-19,” Price said.
In order to test the laboratory leak hypothesis, Joe Biden had already ordered a special investigation by the US secret services in 2021. They should gather more information and come to an assessment within 90 days. However, the report that followed did not come to a uniform conclusion either. Some believe the virus first passed from animals to humans. Others believe humans were affected first, which would support the laboratory hypothesis.
Declared wrong early on
The political problem for the Biden government arises on the one hand from its own ignorance. You need the facts to make an assessment. On the other hand, the laboratory hypothesis cannot simply be wiped away. Prominent representatives such as the former top US health officer Anthony Fauci, but also the German virologist Christian Drosten had repeatedly presented the laboratory hypothesis as absurd.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, physical attacks against people of Asian appearance had been repeated, which led to a high level of sensitivity on the subject. The side effect: Just representing the laboratory hypothesis and pursuing it was often accompanied by accusations of racism in both Germany and the USA. Blanket China bashing by Donald Trump is that.
More thorny questions
In fact, the laboratory hypothesis in the USA is closely linked to a politically sensitive question: Did the USA contribute to virus research in China and possibly also to the development of the corona virus? The focus is once again on Anthony Fauci, who was not only an advisor to the US President, but also director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which in turn is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the US government is.
