‘Lab Leak,’a Politically Poisoned Theory

By Zhong Cheng

The pandemic has stoked great up- heaval. The appearance of new variants is causing problems and preventing countries from returning to normal life. The global battle against COVID-19 is far from finished. But， if the pandemic has taught us anything， it is that in a world of increasing connectivity seemingly disparate issues are intrinsically and intricately linked.

That said， the “lab leak” allegation is being dragged up again， in disregard of the scientific conclusion of the World Health Organization（WHO） that a “lab leak” is extremely unlikely. This time “a report may be released to share in detail the findings of the U.S. intelligence community on the origin of the novel coronavirus，”as U.S. President Joe Biden put it.

Shortly after， Kurt Campbell， the White House top official for Asia， said the U.S. is entering a period of intense competition with China. He said “the period that was broadly described as engagement has come to an end... the dominant paradigm is going to be competition.”

Seeking truth from facts

First， since the origin-tracing is a sciencebased study， to draw on the intelligence apparatus instead of relying on scientific conclusion seems suspicious. Particularly， as U.S. intelligence services have already discredited themselves with the now notorious and outrageous claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Libya and chemical weapon attacks in Syria.

As former Central Intelligence Agency Director and former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo boasted， “We lied， we cheated， we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

With all these examples of bogus intelligence， should the global community trust the findings of U.S. intelligence services that have a proven history of lying to further U.S. foreign policy objectives？

Second， the “lab leak” allegation is poisoned by politics. Many international experts and scholars have questioned and criticized the U.S. practice of politicizing the issue of origin-tracing.

American scholar Peter Daszak， a member of a WHO expert team to Wuhan earlier this year， dismissed U.S. intelligence reports as “political， not scientific，” calling the “lab leak” hypothesis “pure baloney，”saying he was confident his Chinese scientific partners were not hiding anything. He emphasized that he and other scholars who had been to Wuhan for origin-tracing studies had published a wealth of data supporting a “natural spillover，” and pointed out there was a complete lack of data suggesting a lab accident.