The new surge in COVID-19 cases in the United States, highlighted by President Joe Biden and Health Secretary Xavier Becerra both testing positive, is a fresh reminder that accountability remains a mystery. The pandemic originated in China It is a war that has claimed more lives than World War I. In his acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump said:China Virus.”
Yet, paradoxically, it is the United States under Biden that has effectively forgiven Beijing for covering up the origins of the COVID virus, including obstructing an international investigation into the credible possibility that the pathogen was enhanced at a Chinese military facility.Linked Wuhan Institute of Virology. The evidence is grown Viruses ran away It escaped from a Chinese laboratory due to inadequate safety measures.
The U.S. role in aiding China’s cover-up is all the more ironic, since the U.S. has led the world in COVID-19 infections and deaths since the first year of the pandemic. Biden is battling his third COVID-19 infection, despite having been vaccinated and receiving a booster shot.
largely 1.2 million AmericansAccording to US federal data, about 10,000 people have died from COVID-19. According to the WHO, about 7 million Many people die from the disease. However, mortality studies suggest that the total numbers in the U.S. are vastly underestimated. For example, important study A study this year concluded that many of the excess deaths attributed to natural causes in the US are likely “unrecognized COVID deaths.”
If the COVID virus had originated in Russia, specifically in a military-linked laboratory like the one in Wuhan, would the Biden administration have been as tolerant as it has been towards China?
Indeed, a major reason why the US government appears uninterested in uncovering the origins of the COVID virus is because coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab was part of a joint US-China scientific program. Funding Washington has so far not only directly but also through its New York-based US government agencies to explain why US government agencies Eco Health AllianceFunds were funneled to the Wuhan laboratory Already knew It had ties to the Chinese military.
More fundamentally, the most important lesson from the pandemic is that “gain of function” research (like that funded by U.S. government agencies in Wuhan) is the greatest existential threat to humanity that science has ever produced, a greater threat than nuclear weapons. Such research, which aims to change the genetic structure of pathogens to make them more virulent or infectious, remains Ongoing Experiments being conducted in several laboratories in Western countries, China and Russia pose a deadly threat to humanity.
It is not uncommon for viruses to escape from laboratories. In 1979, Anthrax The virus escaped from a Soviet laboratory in Yekaterinburg and killed 64 people, as did the SARS outbreak in Beijing in 2004. as a result Due to a laboratory leak, COVID-19 originated in a city that is a center of supervirus research in China.
Unfortunately, the role of US government agencies in the Wuhan coronavirus research led to a concerted effort, extending across the US scientific institutions and bureaucracy, to obscure the truth about how the pandemic began. Beijing’s own efforts to conceal the origins of the virus received unexpected assistance from Western governments, the US mainstream media, Silicon Valley social media giants, and prominent US scientists who concealed the information. Conflict of interestIncluding connections with Chinese scientists.
In May 2021, Biden said that the Wuhan lab leak wasTwo possible scenariosRegarding the origin of the pandemic, the major American media have dismissed the hypothesis as insanity or Heretical theorySocial media companies have aggressively censored mentions of a possible lab leak and suspended accounts supporting the hypothesis.
For too long, public debate about the origins of COVID has been suppressed by the U.S. responsibilityBut stifling free debate for so long likely bolstered China’s efforts to destroy incriminating evidence of its negligence and complicity in the worst disaster of modern times.
Simply put, the world’s most powerful dictatorship and its most powerful democracy were effective partners in concealing the possibility of a severely disruptive pandemic outbreak after a collaboration backfired and imposed global costs. China A risky experiment US funds fight coronavirus with inadequate safety measures 2014 to 2020 It enabled that reckless lack of responsibility.
Understanding what causes COVID is essential to preventing the next pandemic, but the truth may remain hidden forever.
Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that public trust in scientists in the United States has fallen sharply, according to the Pew Research Center.investigation? Excessive COVID-related policies, from strict lockdowns to mandatory vaccinations, have also contributed to a decline in trust.
There was also hope that as deaths and suffering from COVID spread, governments would ban laboratory experiments that could cause new pandemics by genetically enhancing the virulence of the virus. A US committee early last year said: Stricter rules About laboratory experiments that could lead to a pandemic.
But that hope has been dashed by the continued existence of dangerous laboratory research in some countries, reminiscent of how the horrors of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to a massive nuclear arms race rather than a ban on nuclear weapons.
Brahma Chellaney is a geopolitician and author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).
