Trump officials are pushing spy agencies to pursue ‘unsubstantiated’ conspiracy theory

April 30, 2020 By Alex Henderson, AlterNet
As critical as President Donald Trump has become of the Chinese government’s initial response to coronavirus, he has something in common with Chinese officials: Trump, at first, failed to take the COVID-19 threat seriously. Exactly how COVID-19 started has been debated by health experts; a conspiracy theory on the far right claims that the deadly virus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China. And according to a New York Times article published on April 30, “senior Trump Administration officials” have “pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support” that “unsubstantiated theory.”

Times reporters Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Edward Wong and Adam Goldman explain, “The effort comes as President Trump escalates a public campaign to blame China for the pandemic. Some intelligence analysts are concerned that the pressure from (Trump) Administration officials will distort assessments about the virus and that they could be used as a political weapon in an intensifying battle with China over a disease that has infected more than three million people across the globe.”

The Times journalists, note, however, that “most intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found, and scientists who have studied the genetics of the coronavirus say that the overwhelming probability is that it leapt from animal to human in a non-laboratory setting.”

According to the four Times reporters, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (a former CIA director) has “taken the lead” in pursuing the conspiracy theory — which many scientists have been critical of. In a report published in Nature Medicine in March, five scientists asserted, “We do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

Mazzetti, Barnes, Wong and Goldman report that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “has yet to unearth any data beyond circumstantial evidence to bolster the lab theory, according to current and former government officials — and the agency has told policymakers it lacks enough information to either affirm or refute it. Only getting access to the lab itself and the virus samples it contains could provide definitive proof if it exists, the officials said.”

Trump orders Intel to find link between COVID-19 and Wuhan lab: New York Times

THE WAR PRESIDENT USES WAR JINGOISM DURING PANDEMIC


April 30, 2020 By Brad Reed 


Trump administration officials have ordered intelligence agencies to search for a link between the novel coronavirus and a government-run laboratory in China, according to the New York Times.

So far, there has been no direct evidence that the virus came from the Wuhan lab, and the official explanation for the origins of the disease remains that someone contracted it from eating contaminated meat they bought at a Wuhan market.

However, the Times reports that some intel analysts are worried that Trump will try to manipulate information to blame China to distract from his own administration’s failings on containing the disease.

“Most intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found, and scientists who have studied the genetics of the coronavirus say that the overwhelming probability is that it leapt from animal to human in a nonlaboratory setting, as was the case with H.I.V., Ebola and SARS,” the paper notes.

Trump has alternately blamed and praised China for its handling of the disease, as he has tried to walk a careful line between scapegoating the country while maintaining his relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping.