Trump and his allies float fringe theory in China blame campaign
President Donald Trump and some of his officials are flirting with an outlier theory that the new coronavirus was set loose on the world by a Chinese lab that let it escape.
Without the weight of evidence, they’re trying to blame China for sickness and death from Covid-19 in the United States.
“More and more, we’re hearing the story,” Trump says. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo adds: “The mere fact that we don’t know the answers — that China hasn’t shared the answers — I think is very, very telling.”
A scientific consensus is still evolving. But experts overwhelmingly say analysis of the new coronavirus’ genome rules out the possibility that it was engineered by humans, as some conspiracy theories have suggested. Nor is it likely the virus emerged from a negligent laboratory in China, they say. “I would put it on a list of 1000 different scenarios,” said Nathan Grubaugh an epidemiologist at Yale University.
Scientists say the virus arose naturally in bats. They say the leading theory is that infection among humans began at an animal market in Wuhan, China, probably from an animal that got the virus from a bat.
Even so, Pompeo and others are pointing fingers at an institute that is run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and has done groundbreaking research tracing the likely origins of the Sars virus, finding new bat viruses and discovering how they could jump to people.
“We know that there is the Wuhan Institute of Virology just a handful of miles away from where the wet market was,” Pompeo said on Fox News. The institute is 13km from the market.
US officials say the American Embassy in Beijing did flag concerns
about potential safety issues at the lab in Wuhan in 2018, but stressed there is no evidence that the virus originated there nearly two years later.
The episode shows that both world powers — the country where the virus originally spread and the country with the most sickness and deaths from it — are not above floating shaky theories and using propaganda to divert attention from problems in their pandemic response. China previously spread the falsehood that the virus started with Americans.
China and the US both wasted crucial time responding to the outbreak. More than 3000 people had been infected before China’s government told the public what it had concluded six days earlier — that a pandemic was probably coming.
The United States, also late to take the threat seriously, has lagged a number of other countries in the thick of the pandemic when it comes to its response. Against that backdrop, the pressure for scapegoats is strong.
After weeks of elaborate praise of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s performance in the pandemic, Trump has turned to blaming China and halting US contributions to the World Health Organisation, accusing it of parroting misinformation.
In the US, claims that the virus was created in or released from a Chinese lab emerged just weeks after the outbreak began and quickly spread from fringe internet sites to the wider public, abetted by conspiracy theorists.
The reality is more mundane, said Dr Gregory Poland, head of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
“This virus is a typical bat coronavirus that has developed the capacity to infect other mammals and bats are mammals, too. What’s becoming evident is the natural origin of this fits with the transmission dynamics and biology of it all.”