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<h2 class="f2-p _balance-text f3 f2-ns f1-l lh-title ma0"
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<div class="f7 normal black-60 mt1"><time
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<p>On Wednesday, US President Joe Biden publicly embraced the
conspiracy theory that COVID-19 may have been released from
China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), ordering the US
intelligence agencies to produce a report within 90 days into
the potentially man-made origins of the disease.</p>
<p>The intelligence agencies tasked with determining whether
COVID-19 is a biological weapon played a leading role in one
of the greatest crimes of the twenty-first century—the 2003 US
invasion of Iraq, based on allegations manufactured by the
Central Intelligence Agency that Iraq possessed chemical,
biological, and nuclear “weapons of mass destruction.” That
lie led to the death of over 1 million people and engulfed the
Middle East in war that has lasted to this day.</p>
<figure class="relative ma0 overflow-hidden dn-p">
<div class="relative overflow-hidden "><img class="db relative
center"
src="https://www.wsws.org/asset/f1037954-8efe-4d81-a422-230bedc87c9d?rendition=image1280"></div>
<figcaption class="db avenir f7 f6-m lh-title black-60 tc pt3
ph3">A view of the P4 lab inside the Wuhan Institute of
Virology is seen after a visit by the World Health
Organization team in Wuhan in China's Hubei province on
Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)</figcaption></figure>
<p>Now, an even greater and more dangerous lie is being
perpetrated. The Biden administration, like the Trump
administration before it, is attempting to blame China for a
disease that led by some estimates to the deaths of at least 1
million people in the US. If, as the Trump administration
publicly asserted, COVID-19 is a “weaponized virus” sent by
Beijing against the American population, it would constitute
grounds for war against the most populous country in the
world.</p>
<p>As with “weapons of mass destruction,” leaks from anonymous
intelligence officials are being presented as evidence in a
coordinated media campaign. Within a matter of a few days, the
entire US media has embraced this discredited conspiracy
theory, summed up by an article by the <em>Washington Post</em>
’s lead fact checker entitled “How the Wuhan lab-leak theory
suddenly became credible.”</p>
<p>The stage for this sudden reversal was set by an article
published in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> Sunday,
claiming that “a previously undisclosed US intelligence
report” reveals three staff at the institute became sick and
sought hospital care in November 2019. The article implied
that these three cases are the real origin of the COVID-19
pandemic. The <em>Journal</em> article, however, includes
nothing fundamentally new beyond the contents of a fact sheet
published by the Trump State Department on January 15.</p>
<p>In other words, the most the CIA, NSA and their counterparts
could find, funded with tens of billions of dollars to spy on
the entire world, is that a few people who work at the WIV
happened to get symptoms that the State Department fact sheet
itself admits are “consistent with…common seasonal illnesses”
the month before the virus was first detected.</p>
<p>The story was picked up almost immediately by other major
news outlets, including the <em>Washington Post, Forbes,</em>
the <em>New York</em> <em>Times</em>, Reuters, CNN and
others. It has also been parroted, perhaps most shamefully of
all, by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was seen by millions of people
as a voice of scientific clarity regarding the dangers of the
virus as Trump was claiming that the pandemic would just “go
away.”</p>
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<p>When questioned about the <em>Journal</em> ’s story on
Tuesday, Fauci stated, “Because we don’t know 100 percent what
the origin is, it’s imperative that we look and we do an
investigation.” His comments are a complete 180-degree turn
from what he said last year when asked a similar question. At
the time he stated: “A number of very qualified evolutionary
biologists have said that everything about the stepwise
evolution over time strongly indicates that it evolved in
nature and then jumped species.”</p>
<p>According to the original proponents of the Wuhan lab
conspiracy theory, such as the Chinese billionaire Miles Guo
and the far-right <em>Epoch Times</em>, the Chinese
government created SARS-CoV-2 as a biological weapon using
funding for “gain-of-function” experiments by the US National
Institute of Health. This line was picked up by numerous
right-wing politicians, including Rand Paul, who as recently
as May 11 accused Fauci of authorizing such research.</p>
<p>In the watered-down version now promoted by the <em>Washington
Post</em> and <em>New York Times</em>, COVID-19 “may have”
escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In both
scenarios, however, blame for the at least 3.5 million deaths
caused by the pandemic is placed squarely on China.</p>
<p>Such assertions were rejected by an inquiry into the origins
of COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO) this past
January and February. Drawing on the collective efforts of an
international team of the world’s leading epidemiological
researchers from Australia, China, Denmark, Germany, Japan,
the Netherlands, Qatar, Russia, the United States and Vietnam,
the joint WHO–China report considered the possibility of a
laboratory leak and dismissed it as extremely unlikely. The
report declared, “There is no record of viruses closely
related to SARS-CoV-2 in any laboratory before December 2019,
or genomes that in combination could provide a SARS-CoV-2
genome.”</p>
<p>The WHO report instead reaffirmed what every credible
scientist takes as correct, that the virus came from a natural
source, most likely from a population of bats, and jumped
through a series of other animals before finally mutating to
be contagious and deadly to humans.</p>
<p>Lacking any positive evidence for their “man-made virus”
angle, both the Biden administration and the US media began to
denounce the WHO report as untrustworthy because Chinese
public health officials were involved. To that end, Biden
enlisted 13 of its closer allies and released a joint
statement on March 30 calling for an “independent”
investigation that would not have Chinese “interference and
undue influence.”</p>
<p>Essentially, they are insisting that China do the impossible:
100 percent prove the negative that the virus did not
originate in one of its labs. At the same time, knowing that
it can take years to locate the natural origin of a new
disease—it took 13 years to confirm the origins of </p>
<h2 class="f2-p _balance-text f3 f2-ns f1-l lh-title ma0"
style="line-height: 1.2em;">White House embraces “Wuhan Lab”
conspiracy theory</h2>
<p>the first SARS virus, and the origins of Ebola are still
being researched—they are taking the anti-scientific approach
of proposing a theory and claiming that any gaps in knowledge
of the pandemic’s origins support their claim.</p>
<p>It is worth noting that such hypotheses about the origins of
COVID-19 bear a remarkable similarity to older right-wing
ideas about the origins of HIV, that it was developed by the
United States government in order to suppress various
populations, particularly those of African and Hispanic
descent and homosexuals. Fauci, who helped lead the initial
fight against the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, is no doubt
aware of these parallels, and of the immensely detrimental
effect they have had on educating workers and youth about the
dangers of the disease and the precautions that can be taken
to prevent it.</p>
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<p>Promoting the false idea that the coronavirus pandemic is
man-made is even more dangerous. Over the course of just 15
months, more than 600,000 people in the US have been reported
dead from COVID-19, and the true tally is likely closer to 1
million. The official global death toll is over
three-and-a-half million. There is an immense amount of social
anger over so many having died that is looking for an outlet.
By promoting the Wuhan lab lie, the Biden administration is
seeking to deflect responsibility for the policies of the
financial elite and blame its geopolitical adversary in a form
of “war guilt.”</p>
<p>Such actions are part and parcel of the Biden
administration’s war drive against China. Since taking office,
Biden has attempted to create a political framework to wage
war, backed by the media. These include claims of Chinese
genocide against its Muslim Uyghur minority, potential Chinese
aggression against Taiwan, and, above all, the implication
that the mass suffering of the past year and a half is
ultimately because of—at best—China’s neglect, or—at worst—the
most lethal bio-weapon ever unleashed.</p>
<p>By promoting these ideas, the Biden administration is also
attempting to take pressure off its own domestic policy, which
is essentially the same as Trump’s. The American working class
is keenly aware that the vast majority of the deaths caused by
the pandemic could have been prevented if basic public health
measures had been put into place from the very beginning,
measures that Trump fought against at every step and which
Biden is now abandoning wholesale.</p>
<p>Now that Biden, the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> and the <em>Washington
Post</em> have given life to the Wuhan lab lie, it will
become part of the political bloodstream of the country.
Having legitimized it, they will lose control of it as the
extreme right wing is strengthened by the propagation of such
reactionary conceptions. It will serve as a motive for violent
attacks on Asian Americans, which have surged over the past
year.</p>
<p>The <em>Washington Post</em> has explicitly promoted the
fascistic Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) as someone who “from
the start” promoted this conspiracy theory and who “the
history books” may eventually “reward.” Cotton maintains that
the 2020 election was stolen and that Trump is still the
legitimate chief executive, and giving him such credibility
only supports the political forces behind the January 6
insurrection.</p>
<p>It is these forces that ultimately benefit from the
atmosphere of anti-science and xenophobia being engendered by
the Biden administration and the US media establishment. They
have no interest in protecting the lives of the American
population, much less seeking the “truth” of the pandemic’s
origins, but are attempting to protect the country’s corporate
and financial interests while preparing for new imperialist
campaigns abroad.</p>
<p>The Biden administration’s cynical efforts to blame China for
the crimes of American capitalism must be opposed. American
workers must reject xenophobia and nationalism and say
together with their Chinese brothers and sisters: Our enemy is
the capitalist class!</p>
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