A new surge of COVID-19 in the United States — highlighted by President Joe Biden and his health secretary, Xavier Becerra, both testing positive — serves as a fresh reminder that there is still no accountability for a pandemic originating in China that killed more people than World War I. In his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump referred to the “China virus.”
But, paradoxically, it is the U.S. under Biden that has effectively let Beijing off the hook for obscuring the origins of the COVID virus, including stonewalling international investigations into the credible possibility that the pathogen was functionally enhanced at China’s military-linked Wuhan Institute of Virology. Evidence has grown that the virus escaped from the Chinese lab due to inadequate safeguards.
The U.S. role in aiding China’s coverup is all the more ironic because America has led the world in total COVID case counts and number of deaths since the first year of the pandemic. Biden, despite being vaccinated and boosted, is battling his third bout with COVID.
Almost 1.2 million Americans, according to U.S. federal data, have died from COVID; worldwide, according to the WHO, around 7 million people died from this disease. Excess mortality studies, however, suggest that the American total is vastly undercounted. For example, one important study this year concluded that that many excess deaths attributed to natural causes in the U.S. were likely “unrecognized COVID deaths.”
Had the COVID virus originated in Russia, especially in a military-linked lab similar to the one in Wuhan, would the Biden administration have been as forgiving as it has been toward China?
To be sure, the key reason why the U.S. government seems uninterested in getting to the bottom of how the COVID virus originated is that the coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab was part of a collaborative U.S.-China scientific program funded by the American government. Washington has up to now offered no explanation why U.S. government agencies, either directly or through the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, were funneling money to the Wuhan lab that they knew was linked to the Chinese military.
More fundamentally, the most important lesson from the pandemic is that “gain of function” research (of the type U.S. government agencies funded in Wuhan) is the greatest existential threat to humankind ever produced by science — a threat bigger than nuclear weapons. Such research, aimed at studying pathogens by altering their genetic make-up to enhance their virulence or infectiousness, is still continuing in some labs in the West, China and Russia. These experiments represents a mortal threat to humanity.
Viruses leaking from laboratories are not uncommon. In 1979, anthrax escaped from a Soviet laboratory in Yekaterinburg, killing 64 people. The 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing also resulted from a lab leak. COVID originated in the city that is the center of Chinese research on super-viruses.
Unfortunately, the role of American government agencies in the Wuhan coronavirus research led to a concerted effort, extending to U.S. scientific and bureaucratic institutions, to obscure the truth on how the pandemic began. Beijing’s own efforts to conceal the virus’s origins received unexpected help from Western governments, American mainstream media, Silicon Valley social media giants and some prominent American scientists who hid their conflicts of interest, including their ties with Chinese scientists.
Until Biden in May 2021 publicly called the Wuhan lab-leak theory one of “two likely scenarios” on how the pandemic originated, major American media outlets treated that hypothesis as a crazy idea or fringe theory. Social media companies aggressively censored references to a possible lab leak, and even suspended accounts for supporting that hypothesis.
The long suppression of an open debate on the COVID origins was intended to obscure America’s probable culpability. But the prolonged silencing of free discussion likely aided China’s efforts to destroy any incriminating evidence of its negligence or complicity in the worst disaster of our time.
Simply put, the world’s most powerful autocracy and most powerful democracy were effective partners in covering up the likely genesis of a severely disruptive pandemic after their research collaboration backfired, imposing global costs. While China conducted dangerous experiments on coronaviruses with poor safeguards, U.S. funding from 2014 to 2020 enabled that reckless lack of responsibility.
Understanding what caused COVID is essential to prevent the next pandemic, yet the truth may remain hidden forever.
Against this backdrop, is it any surprise that public trust in scientists has declined sharply in the U.S., according to a Pew Research Center survey? COVID-related policy excesses, from stringent lockdowns to vaccination mandates, have also contributed to the eroding trust.
There was some hope that the widespread death and suffering from COVID would force governments to ban lab experiments that, by genetically enhancing the pathogenic power of viruses, could trigger another pandemic. A U.S. panel early last year recommended stricter rules on lab experiments that could cause a pandemic.
But, with dangerous lab research still continuing in several countries, that hope has dissipated. This is reminiscent of how the horrors of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led not to a ban on nuclear weapons but to a major nuclear arms race.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).