How the Atlantic Council and other neocon think tanks are helping the U.S. to push the fake “Virus Origin” campaign using small groups of scientists and pseudo scientists as a cover

Lee Siu Hin
7/31/2021

The 2020 Ig Nobel Prize (a satiric prize awarded annually to celebrate unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research) for Management was awarded to five professional hitmen in Guangxi province of China, who managed a contract for a hit job (a murder performed for money) in the following way: After accepting payment to perform the murder, Xi Guang-An then in turn subcontracted the task to Mo Tian-Xiang, who then in turn subcontracted the task to Yang Kang-Sheng, who then in turn subcontracted the task to Yang Guang-Sheng, who then in turn subcontracted the task to Ling Xian-Si. Each subcontracted hitman received a smaller percentage of the fee, and nobody actually performed a murder. Ling was not happy to get such a small cut, so he went to the person planning the hit, begged him to pretend to be dead so Ling could get the money; the person in turn would call the police and all the hitmen would be arrested; interesting.

That’s exactly what is happening right now when President Biden and the right-wing neocon Republicans are resurrecting and viciously spreading the baseless “Wuhan Institute of Virology man-made virus lab-leak” conspiracy theory, started by far-right Republicans and former President Trump last year. This scenario accuses China of causing the global COVID-19 pandemic disaster that already has led to 197 million infections and 4.2 million deaths. (Democrat and Republican visions of the conspiracy are different, which will be explained later).

Instead of working together in cooperation with China and the World Health Organization (WHO) to focus on the fight against COVID-19 which will resurge later this year, the U.S. instead is wasting more time calling for an international investigation of China and discrediting the earlier WHO conclusion that the theory of a China lab leak virus is “highly unlikely”. On May 26th Biden called for his intelligence agency to issue a report within 90 days, that is sometime in August. If successful, it’ll be a road map for the U.S. to launch a COVID responsibility movement against China for the coming years.

According to our investigation, unlike the failed Trump “lab-leak” propaganda campaign last year, the Biden administration's fake scientific campaign is a well-organized top-down by anti-China neocons. It is a push by far-right politicians such as Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), and others, and is being executed by Neocon anti-communist think tanks such as the Atlantic Council, the Hudson Institute, the Center for the New American Security, and others. They are coordinated by elite DC neocon warmonger think tankers like Yu “Miles” Maochun, David Feith, and so on. They will bring small groups of biological and medical scientists from Broad Institute of MIT, Harvard among others, as well as non-medically trained “experts” like Nicholas Wade, the racist pseudoscientists, neocon Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Gordon and others, to build an ad hoc working group to launch a fake grassroots “scientific” campaign. Their intent is to silence majority and legitimate scientific community voices who believe COVID-19 virus came from natural origins. They want to call for a U.S. investigation and push for second WHO mission that’ll be supporting the baseless U.S. conspiracy theory. 

It’s a textbook-U.S. military intelligence style step-by-step “self-directed and self-acted” covert operation scam. Chinaphobia DC neocons fantasize that they can control the world by fabricating “evidence” during their own investigation to prove China leaked the virus. Then they will call for international sanctions against China, demand massive financial compensation, direct political pressure to undermine the Chinese government and its influence around the world.

Between March and June, they coordinated dozen of “reports” to spread baseless conspiracy theories in the media and academic and neocon think-tank circles under the guise of “science,” calling for a redo of WHO’s recent investigation of how the virus originated in China earlier this year. Not surprisingly, the timing coincides with Biden’s May 26th call for an intelligence report within 90 days about China’s responsibility for lab leaks and the virus' origin; most likely the report will quote much “evidence” from these think-tank “sources”.

The Open Letters from the “Scientists”
Early this year when WHO sent a scientific investigative team to Wuhan, China, it concluded that there was no evidence to support the lab leak theory, concluding that the virus originated somewhere else. They recommended further investigation in different countries. Realizing that baseless political rhetoric against scientists wouldn’t work; U.S. politicians changed tactics and began recruiting “scientist” against scientist.

In order to push their hidden agendas they recruited biologists and medical professionals as spokespersons who would use scientific trappings to bolster their misleading claims that China had lied about the virus lab leak. Then they coordinated with right-wing media interviews to amplify their demands for a second stage  investigation into China, giving the impression that there is a large sector of the scientific community (including scientists from Harvard University) calling for the U.S.-led WHO investigation.
The first WHO investigation had “too many” Chinese scientists and no I”ndependent” western/U.S. (CIA-backed) scientists on the team. They want to exclude all Chinese scientists and only allow western (CIA-backed) scientists on the team for a second WHO investigation so U.S. can manipulate the results for their own political goals.

However, since the overwhelming majority of the professional medical community, scientists and doctors around the world don’t support the conspiracy theory, no respectable or prominent medical/biological scientists or professors will risk their reputations or careers to support a theory that is not supported by hard data or peer reviews.  

In the science community, it’s a common understanding that for scientists to offer a scientific claim (or discovery), they need to spend at least a minimum of half to a few years to research the topic, collect enough date to analyze and publish a “Science Citation Index” (SCI) level academic paper, with peer reviews to approve its accuracy. This is a basic requirement for scientific work in order to separate speculation from hard science.

Obviously an academic paper to conclude that the hypothesis that COVID started in WIV as a man-made virus leak can’t be ready within 90 days; without being able to present a SCI paper or hard data to prove their claim, in the professional world it will just count as a wild unproven theory – no major professional medical associations, universities, or international health officials will endorse such a non-peer reviewed, unproven theory and will not join their call to launch any wild actions.

Therefore so far only a few dozen mid- or low-level, current or former, biomedical professors or researchers are openly involved in this scheme; not surprisingly, most are white males from the U.S., with a few other international “partners” from U.K., Australia and France.

On March 14th just after the WHO investigative team concluded their China tour and issued their finding, an open letter from a few dozen scientists (and non-scientists) was published in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and other publications, viciously discrediting the WHO finding, spreading rumors, racially attacking China, and calling for another WHO investigation targeting China.

Most notably there are two such open letters: the March 14th and May 14th letters.

The March 14th letter with 25 co-signers included several bio-scientists from around the world, but strangely the letter also included signers from several non-medical professions: non-biology related engineering (ECP) areas and even Masters of Business Administration (MBA) business-degree backgrounds.

The May 14th letter with 18 co-signers, published in the prestigious Science Magazine, are almost all bio-medical professionals.
Strangely, the March 14th letter got more publicity. It was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times; the May 14th letter from more “professional” signers got less attention from the corporate media.

Most co-signers of these two letters who have a bio-medical background are mid-ranking college university professors or researchers, not key decision makers for their university departments or research institutes – they only signed the letters as individuals.

With a deeper look, we found the most important co-signers of these two letters are not bio scientists, but people from the think tanks (not accidentally, they are researchers or professors who do not have bio-medical degrees).

For the March 14th letter it was Jamie Metzl, a senior fellow from the Atlantic Council, a neocon think tank with a long history of having anti-communist/anti-China/anti-Russia agendas, serving the Council's pro-U.S. client states’ global hegemony agenda with manufactured deceptions supporting the U.S. and their allies’ covert actions, military coups and invasions. The Council's leadership includes many former top U.S. military and intelligence officials who receive substantial overseas funds and conduct activities that "typically align with foreign governments’ agendas." Their leading donors in 2018 were Facebook and the British government, according to Wikipedia.

Before joining the Atlantic Council, Metzl, a celebrity-type politician and writer, was the executive vice president of the Asia Society (a neocon think tank for voicing U.S. interests in Asia, notably promoting their anti-China/anti-North Korea positions). He developed and led the Asia Society's Asia 21 Young Leaders Initiative, a Pan-Asia-Pacific leadership development program. He had served the Clinton administration as director for multilateral and humanitarian affairs on the National Security Council and at the U.S. Department of State as senior advisor to the undersecretary for public diplomacy, public affairs and information technology, as well as being senior coordinator for international public information. He has also served as deputy staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under then Senator Joe Biden, according to the Wikipedia.

As for the May 14th letter the “mover-and-shaker” co-signer was Benjamin E. Deverman from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, MA. While he is a respected high-ranking scientist and the Broad Institute is a highly recognized medical research institution globally, one of his colleagues and co-signers from the Institute, Yujia Alina Chan (who also co-signed the March 14th letter), clearly is a hard-core anti-China pro-“Wuhan lab leak” conspiracy theorist. She’s repeatedly used her Institute credentials to better spread her message to the academic world and the corporate media. Her action promoting a nonacademic wild fringe theory with Chinaphobic messaging (she is ethnic Chinese living in the U.S.) had already been widely discredited by the bio-medical community. It’s clear that someone from higher-up at the organization – this could be Deverman – gave approval for her to do this.

These two open letters, along with the “investigations” from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, have helped U.S. politicians hype the issue since March. By May, based on the “hype,” Biden decided to call for the intelligence report within 90 days, a well-coordinated step-by-step political show. By comparison, in early July over 1,200 scientists globally issued a statement in The Lancet, the world's most respected medical journal from the U.K., criticizing U.K. Prime Minster Boris Johnson’s decision to lift most COVID restrictions on July 19th, the so-called “Freedom Day,” while infections surged, there were warnings of supermarket shortages, and he himself was forced to self-isolate due to COVID among his close contacts. The statement in the Lancet got almost no major corporate media attention.

Because these are bogus letters, it is not surprising that some co-signers of the letters later backed-off and publicly clarified that they are not supporting the man-made virus lab leak theory.

Pamela Bjorkman, professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, CA, is one of the May 14th letter co-signers. In a recent letter to TWiV, or This Week in Virology, a weekly podcast about viruses, she claimed she was “naïve” in signing it and that she had done so because she had hoped to receive more funding for her research. “I thought the letter would have the effect of prompting more funding for searching for natural viruses in animal reservoirs, which I personally have always assumed represent the origin of SARS-CoV-2 infections in humans,” she said. “Perhaps naïvely, I did not anticipate that the letter would be used to promote the lab origin hypothesis,” she explained about having signed the letter. 

Another co-signer of the May 14th letter, Professor Michael Worobey, head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona at Tucson, AZ, also spoke out recently against the “misinterpretation” of his viewpoints on the lab leak scenario, according to Xinhua News Agency.

On July 23rd, he retweeted a post from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health which voiced support for “an animal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” saying that by  reposting the post he was to trying to “explain why I (continue to) think that a zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2 is more likely than a lab leak scenario – even though I signed 'The Science Letter.'”      

However, they’re not mentioning who had been asking them to sign the letter without making their own serious review, and who could be the person to promise funding if they’re going to sign a petition they didn’t draft. It doesn’t seem like a major academic research foundation would be asking them, more likely a nonacademic think tank or lobbyist-type organization with DC political connections, or that would be promising  Federal funding (SARS-CoV-2 origin research is a very sensitive topic, most likely only the government will fund such research projects.)

The Think Tanks
So, who’s helping politicians manufacture conspiracy and who's directing the media hype? It’s the far-right neocon think tanks, mostly inside the Beltway, who are directing the task. According to Mint Press, the lab leak theory bears a striking resemblance to the WMD hoax of 2002, not only because one of its key players is literally the same journalist using potentially the same anonymous sources, but also because of the bipartisan political and media support it enjoys.

David Asher, a former U.S. government official who served in the U.S. State Department last year, was responsible for fabricating the rumors smearing China’s WIV (the lab that the U.S. originally accused of leaking the COVID virus). Asher recently mentioned in an interview with U.S. media that the U.S. government should offer a “bounty of US$10 to US$15 million” to “seduce” those Chinese “senior officials” who know the “truth” of the COVID outbreak to defect to the United States and tell the United States what it wants to hear.

This “senior researcher” who is currently working for the Hudson Institute, a conservative American think tank, even said that the US government should send CIA agents to help such people “flee” from China to America, as it did with the Soviet Union, according to the Chinese media investigation.

A conspiracy theory that is out of thin-air and being advanced by journalists without a medical background or pseudoscientists must be packaged like “hard” science. It needs major politically linked think tanks to give credible endorsements – just like Wall Street repackaging of toxic debt into AAA-rated bonds that led to the 2008 financial crisis.

Nicholas Wade’s “Wuhan lab-leak” conspiracy story is an example of a science reporter without any credible academic bio-medical research background. In order to repackage his conspiracy theory and give it a scientific appearance, he was invited to legitimize his work by speaking at different think tanks. One such opportunity was giving a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a right-wing anti-communist think tank, where he spoke on their June 8th podcast with host James M. Lindsay. Lindsay is CFR’s senior vice president and an elite establishment hawk who has written a book praising former President George W. Bush as “a strong and decisive leader with a coherent worldview” to lead a “revolution in foreign policy.”

It’s important to note that in this “lab-leak” conspiracy popularity contest not every anti-communist/anti-China conspiracy think tank is created equal. It’s necessary to separate those who’re movers-and-shakers from the top neocon decision makers, such as the CFR, the Hudson Institute and the Atlantic Council, and the others who’re just small outsiders.

There are clearly some seemingly very small groups of organizations/individuals who are “appointed” to speak and are highlighted by the media and endorsed by major neocon think tanks; there are others who do not have their blessing and who aren’t in this circle.
One such example is Bioscience Resource Project, a think tank based in Ithaca, NY, which runs the Independent Science News. The watchdog mediabiasfactcheck.com, labels this as a conspiracy-pseudoscience organization which spreads conspiracy-pseudoscience theory about GMOs. They also go full-steam ahead in publishing many COVID-19 lab-leak conspiracy theories; however, except in a few conspiracy circles, their reports are never highlighted by major think tanks, politicians or major corporate media.

David Relman, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University, said at an online meeting that it is troubling that investigating the origin of the virus has become deeply politicized. It has gotten to a point where it is “unwise and unhelpful” to share an opinion on the origin as many people have strong views on which scenario is more likely, he said, according to the Chinese media reports.

The neocon think tanks have successfully intimidated scientists from speaking openly about how the virus might not be manmade and leaked from WIV. By redbaiting them, they have labeled them greedy individuals with financial ties to China. It is completely misleading because scientists who work with Chinese universities are not necessarily spokespersons-for-hire to China. At the same time they are praising racist neocon pseudo scientists for spreading their conspiracy theory.

The Pseudo Scientists
Because only a few dozen scientists around the world will choose to risk their academic reputation to join the conspiracy campaign, and they’re often too soft-spoken for spreading rhetoric publicly, there’s a need to find another group of out spoken propagandists who have some kind of tech-celebrity background to do the job, and here is where the pseudo scientists come in. They’re usually science writers for the popular-science magazines or newspaper science sections, they’re not bio-scientists nor have they done any related bio-medical research or published any peer-reviewed SCI scientific papers. They write “investigative” reports on the “lab-leak” theory pretending to know what they’re talking about. However, since they’re not actually bio-scientists, no international research institute or universities will endorse their writings. The think tanks come into the picture by blessing them. 

Based on the open records, much evidence shows they work side-by-side – pseudo science (media) talk shows and think tanks will give them academic legitimacy for cover. 

In early May, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS, a highly respected magazine run by scientists) republished a Medium blog post by controversial science writer Nicholas Wade, a discredited, racist pseudoscientist. His 2014 book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,” contends that humanity could be broken down genetically into three distinct groups — Africans, Caucasians and East Asians — and that each are sufficiently genetically distinct from each other as to qualify as subspecies, according to the Mint Press.

In the article that appeared in BAS he recycled the unfounded claim that COVID had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
His evidence was thin, just a theory resting on shaky ground, but because he was published by the BAS, it immediately got a lot of attention, especially from liberal/progressive anti-war media. More troublesome is that a neocon force behind Wade, the Council on Foreign Relations, may have helped get his article accepted by BAS.  

Despite the fact that Wade has no new (or any) credible evidence for a lab leak, and he is not a trained scientist, he has been getting a lot of attention from seemingly very “smart” scientists and critical progressive journalists. According to the Mint Press, BAS refused to explain why they’d accepted a conspiracy article from a known racist pseudo scientist. Many believe the forces (and money) behind him had invested heavily in promoting him. 

The “Evidence”
Last year, U.S. media claimed that a "female scientist" who was engaged in research on the coronavirus at the Hong Kong University (HKU) in China had "defected" to the United States. But the woman Yan Limeng was actually an ordinary employee from HKU who is not an expert from the area and did not know anything about the WIV. But in order to meet the needs of the anti-China forces who brought her to the U.S. to prove the “lab-leak theory, she chose to fabricate her credentials and the story of WIV. Initially she was the “star” of the U.S. media but as soon as she wasn’t able to back up her claim, the liberal media dropped her but Rupert Murdoch’s Fox TV still endorses her stories.

On May 24th another of Rupert Murdoch’s publications, the Wall Street Journal, published an “exclusive revelation,” the so-called “Report on Sick Staff at Wuhan Lab Fuels Covid-19 Debate.” The “evidence” was based on nothing – it came from a U.S. intelligence report citing unnamed “current and former officials” who claimed that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology “went to hospital in November 2019, shortly before a confirmed outbreak” of COVID-19.

A day later, on May 25, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, speaking at the United Nations World Health Assembly, demanded a “transparent” investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

Then on May 26, U.S. President Joe Biden called on the “Intelligence Community” to investigate whether COVID-19 arose “from a laboratory accident” and “report back to me in 90 days” according to the WSWS.

Writer of the WSJ article is Michael R. Gordon, the same reporter who in 2002 claimed he had the so-called “evidence” of “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the destruction of the country, and then to the Syrian civil war, the rise of ISIS that killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians, and the destruction of that country as well.

When this person worked for the New York Times 19 years ago, he hyped an article about Iraq "trying to acquire nuclear weapons" and "purchasing aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium centrifuges." This article was widely quoted by high-level U.S. government officials and became an important basis for the Bush administration to launch the Iraq war. Does such a person who has a history of falsifying major news and causing extremely bad consequences have any credibility to speak of the “lab-leak theory”?
Gordon mentioned other people in his article: former U.S. official and Hoover Institution visiting fellow Yu Maochun, and Hudson Institute researcher David Asher.

Yu “Miles” Maochun is a famous neocon anti-communist/anti-China scholar, born and educated in socialist China but who has chosen to act against his motherland and move to the U.S. He currently teaches East Asia and Military History at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. He has written books such as “The Dragon's War” to viciously attack China and suggest the U.S. should launch a military campaign in the region. He was principal China policy and planning adviser to former United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during the Trump era.

David Asher, is the Hudson Institute researcher focusing on U.S. foreign policy in Asia, economic and financial policy toward the U.S., and a former Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). He has been working at the U.S. Department of State for the past 25 years where he “played a senior role in numerous economic and financial pressure campaigns involving defiant states, terrorist organizations, drug cartels, and weapons proliferation networks,” including North Korea, Iran and ISIS, according to his bio at the CNAS website.

On June 6th David Asher and Yu Maochun published a so-called “report” under the Hudson Institute’s banner, entitled “A Just Response to Beijing’s COVID-19 Abuses.” Besides spreading the baseless “WIV lab leak” conspiracy theory, they offer the Biden administration "advice" how to sanction China for "war crimes" for manufacturing biological and chemical weapons. They call for civil claims against China “if that government does not provide substantive cooperation, including direct access to physical evidence, within a specified time frame.”

The report’s other co-authors, according to their bios, have very close past and current connections to the U.S. Department of State, Pentagon and the intelligence community. These DC-bureaucratic elite war monger neocons with long histories of interests against North Korea, Iran, Syria and China are:

David Feith, Adjunct Senior Fellow of the Center for a New American Security, was a former Trump State Department official, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Before that he was an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong.

Matthew Zweig, former Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), “produces accurate and timely analyses, identifies illicit activities, and provides policy options – all with the aim of strengthening U.S. national security and reducing or eliminating threats posed by adversaries and enemies of the United States and other free nations,” according to the FDD website. Zweig “served as the Senior Sanctions Advisor in the Office of the Special Representative for Syria Engagement” at the State Department, also worked interagency partners, multinational counterparts, and others to help implement the “anti-Assad economic pressure elements of the administration’s Syria strategy.” From 2001 to 2018, Zweig served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, according to his FDD bio.

Thomas DiNanno is an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute. He served as a professional staff member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Assistant Secretary of State of the Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Bureau from 2018-2021. He was also assistant administrator at the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency “where he oversaw nearly $5 billion in counter-terrorism programs and national preparedness initiatives that focused on resilient public safety communications systems, national continuity planning, and cyber-security initiatives,” according to his bio.

They’re not just a circle of “friends” connected together out of political convenience; further investigation found that they have all been well connected for a while. Michael Gordon also has very close connections with the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) where David Feith from CNAS is spearheading calls for “transparency” with COVID origins following “his” WSJ “revelations” and Fox TV; and they are connected to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) where they recently invited Nicholas Wade to speak.

They have such close and closed neocon, political media, think tank, pseudo scientist inner-circle connections, no wonder it sounds like just one big happy family.

The Politicians
There’s no doubt that at the top of the “WIV virus leak” deception-making food-chain there will always be the politicians and the think tank alliance who take the lead and where it is Joe Biden/Nancy Pelosi on the Democratic side, Donald Trump/Tom Cotton/Ted Cruz/Mike Gallagher on the Republican side, with their common goal to politically undermine China; only the rhetoric is slightly different.

U.S. politicians mostly come from a lawyer background – they certainly don’t know anything about molecular biology – and they need scientists, think tanks and journalists to help them achieve their political goals.

Picture the politicians as the “boss” at the top-of-the chain-of-command, the think tanks as the “fixers,” the media as the “stereo-amplifiers,” and the scientists (who are supposed to be the most important part of this scientific investigation) are merely at the bottom of the chain of command, the “foot-soldiers” of all of those above.

“Scientists” and pseudoscientists who’re calling for an investigation into the “lab-origin” represent only a small fringe number of the scientific community. Therefore it is necessary for think tanks and media to hype their significance to make them look “big.”

Meanwhile, they will use any means to discredit – even bring dirty-war type toxic and violent threats into the scientific community against any scientists who oppose the “lab-leak” theory, in order to shut them down. For the past several months, several bio-scientists who are against the “lab-leak” theory have been harassed by the media and the politicians.

Historically, most neocon think tanks are Republican-based, and academia/research institute “scientists” on the other hand, are more liberal/Democratic Party oriented, while both sides are accusing China of having “leaked the virus.” Neocon think tanks are accusing China of making manmade bio weapons that they deliberately leaked to the world; while academia/research institutes “suspect” WIV was working on a non-military project and accidently leaked the virus.

Why is there a difference? The possible explanation is based on their track record: neocon think tanks are mostly non-biomedical science related warmongers, they shamelessly lie for a living; while academia/research institutes are scientists who pride themselves in being able to say “I am the expert.” They worry that if their deceptions go too far, they could backfire on them later and they would be facing academic condemnation and even lose their comfortable ivy tower jobs. 

Their difference also leads to the open air stupid dog fights between think tanks/ Republican politicians vs. academia/research institutes/Democratic politicians over who the real “experts” are. While Republicans accuse Democrats/Biden of being “too soft” on the “virus origin” probe, liberal media like Politico fight back, accusing “Republicans dive  into the politically fraught push for Covid's origin story” (6/4/2021). Even the name calling in the May 27th CNN interview, where Marc Lipsitch from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (a co-signer of the May 14th open letter), insisted China “lied” and there is the possibility of a “lab leak.” But when he ask by CNN host to comment Dr. Robert Redfield, Trump’s former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), when Redfield offered his “lab leak” conspiracy theory at the earlier interview, Lipsitch accused saying that Redfield did not “know what he is talking about.”

Besides the usual “anti-China” suspect Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton (who had been leading the “Wuhan virus lab leak” conspiracy campaign early last year even before former President Trump start saying it, U.S. politicians like Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and so on, also took this opportunity to call for their own congressional investigation political theater in recent months.

U.S. senators including Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez on the other hand sent a letter to President Joe Biden on July 28th asking the administration to take three steps on COVID-19 origins - directing the intelligence community to continue investigating, working with allies and partners to "use all available resources and tools" to pressure Beijing into permitting an investigation in China.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas on the other hand, is a good example how a politician acts when their political future is at the stake: they need to find a political hype. After his failure on COVID spreading and the disastrous Texas storm response early this year, he began hyping the “lab-leak” theory for his personal political future. Cruz's allegations are similar to wild claims made by other US politicians. Texas is one of the worst states in the U.S. in terms of confirmed COVID-19 cases but obviously he has not focused on effectively responding to the epidemic.

Former President Trump and his far-right anti-communist Republicans began spreading “China virus” fringe conspiracy theories last summer but other than a lot of loud propaganda they never offered any concrete evidence to prove their claim; their actions went nowhere, only becoming material for TV jokes for the liberal media.

Now Biden and the Democrats want to distract the public from his own failures in handling the pandemic as well as vaccine racism at home and vaccine imperialism abroad. They are recycling last year’s far-right neocon racist anti-China conspiracy campaign. But they understand that political rhetoric won’t be enough; they will need a “systematic” political PR approach. Neocon think tankers with past expertise on fabricated Iraq WMDs, Iran nuclear capacities or Syrian chemical weapons can certainly offer their “services” to the Democratic White House in this latest “WIV virus lab leak” hoax.

Why Now?
Why is the U.S. desperately doing this? And why now? Because the U.S. is facing a desperate COVID resurgence with the Delta variant. Biden has clearly lost the fight against the pandemic. The worst case scenario is that the U.S. could see another peak in the coming winter, with hundreds of thousands of infections and thousands of deaths daily by mid-October. With the possibility of hyper-inflation, even an economic crash, caused by the massive printing of money (the pandemic “stimulus”), it will lead to massive Democratic losses in the 2022 mid-term election. The “Wuhan virus” hoax invented by right-wing Republicans and former President Trump for their election 2020 could still be a great tool for Biden and the Democrats to recycle to distract the public from focusing on the real American issues.

The “man-made Wuhan lab-leak” conspiracy not only would embarrass China, but also could supply a long-term racist political and military strategy for the U.S. to launch a zero-sum cold war against China:

1) Use the virus origin probe to control the World Health Organization (WHO): after Trump took office in 2017, U.S. relations with WHO and other international bodies (such as the World Trade Organization, the United Nations and the Paris Climate Accord) have been growing increasingly sour. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, WHO has praised China for their anti-pandemic efforts refusing to side with the U.S. against China, which enraged Trump. In April 2020, he announced that the U.S. would halt funding for WHO, and in May 2020 he declared that the United States would “terminate” its relationship with the organization. When Biden took office early this year, he took a “softer” approach by rejoining WHO while behind the scene, he has tried to use political muscle and think tanks as pressure groups to coordinate the massive “virus leak” conspiracy campaign against WHO credibility on dealing with China, in order to oust the top WHO leadership whom the U.S. doesn’t like, and replace it with U.S. puppets. As China Daily says: “It is clear that the US returned to the WHO only to try to take control of it, as the country is by no means content with its status as a member equal to others. Compared with its predecessor, the Biden administration has only intensified the efforts to press the WHO to do the US' bidding, and so make the world health body its puppet.”  

2) The use of Chinaphobia rhetoric to blame China for the global health disaster: It has already partially succeeded in the U.S. and the western world, where 60% or more people believe the Trump/Republican “WIV man-made virus lab leak” theory. Although still an unproven fringe racist theory, the U.S. hopes it can hijack the WHO leadership and get it to support the conspiracy. By doing this it will recreate the situation faced by Iraq in 2003 when the U.S. successfully pushed the idea that Iraq had WMDs (weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear and chemical/biological/nuclear weapons that the U.N. prohibited Iraq to have). This conspiracy in the United Nations Security Council gave the U.S. and the western countries license to invade Iraq. With help from neocon think tanks to formulate the strategy, they now want to recycle the same tactic to push for international sanctions and demand compensation to the world for the losses stemming from the pandemic (just like what the U.S. and the western countries had done to Iraq during the UN-imposed sanctions after the first Gulf War of 1990s).

3)  Destroy China's global influence: China's Belt and Road Initiative is one of the biggest “fears” of the U.S. Also China’s successful anti-COVID global solidarity diplomacy with Africa, Latin America and South East Asia has certainly made neocons very jealous. They’re dreaming of a simple lab leak hoax that can destroy Chinese credibility around the world, along with facing sanctions to destabilize China.

4) Prevent the growing international call for the WHO to launch a COVID next stage origin investigation from focusing on the U.S., especially on investigating Fort Detrick in Frederick, MD.: Fort Detrick has been the notorious U.S. biological weapons lab where the CIA had their operations. It is well documented that they were using civilians for testing LSD, anthrax and other bio-weapons in communities. Because of their dirty history and many unexplained illnesses that happened in 2019 around the region, many conspiracy theorists suggest Fort Detrick is the “real” site of the COVID virus lab leaks. While there is still no proof, if WHO comes to the U.S. for investigation, it will expose the dark history of Fort Detrick and may find some evidence – it would certainly be a political disaster for the U.S. and a victory for China.

However, China is not Iraq or Syria; Biden will certainly not find any proof, and their actions certainly will fail and backfire on them, dealing them a humiliating political defeat.

So what’ll happen next?
In late July China rejected WHO’s Phase 2 COVID-19 origins study (the so called second-phase study to audit the first WHO COVID origin report done early this year), calling it a “lack of respect for common sense, arrogant toward science” according to statements from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China.

Chinese health authorities and officials from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had spoken and slammed the "lab-leak" theory, stressing that no staff of WIV have been infected with COVID-19, and WIV has no viruses that can directly infect human beings. Their voices have been increasingly echoed from the global scientific communities.

While calling the World Health Organization (WHO)'s second phase study proposal on COVID-19 origins politically motivated, Chinese health officials and observers said the next stage study should be carried out in more countries and places around the world on the basis of wide consultations among member states, not in places that have already been inspected.

So China had fight back by submitted their proposal to the WHO on July 29th on how second phase of the COVID-19 origin study should be “an effort to support and coordinate with the organization in tracing the origins of the virus globally,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said. The plan emphasizes that the investigation should be led by scientists, based on evidence and carried out in multiple places around the world, Zhao said.

Meantime, on July 17th an online petition organized by Chinese net citizens calling for WHO Fort Detrick probe draws 20 million signatures by July 31st; China further urges U.S. to open University of North Carolina, and publishing data on U.S. sick soldiers who attended the 2019 Wuhan Military World Games to the WHO investigators, incidents that had been reported unusual illness similar to the COVID at 2019 (before Wuhan had first known case in late 2019).

China’s call has been supported by more than 60 countries have appealed to the WHO not to let its origin tracing efforts be politicized.

Since July the U.S. has seeing a COVID resurgence across the country; Biden promised when he took office in January that 70% of Americans would be vaccinated by the 4th of July and that COVID would be under control by summer. However; the U.S. didn’t meet its vaccination target in July, and the new Delta variant has caused a new COVID surge in the U.S. this summer. On July 27th daily cases had reached a hundred thousand, the highest since last February, with the deaths slowly increasing to 500 per day.

On July 21st Massachusetts reported more than 5,000 breakthrough COVID infections and 80 deaths, according to the CBSBoston.com; it’s also the same alarming situation on the other side of the country in Los Angeles County. There on July 23rd it was officially reported that COVID-19 transmission was rapidly rising with the Delta variant: there were 3,058 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Los Angeles County and 17 new deaths. For the first time since February 13th there were more than 3,000 daily cases reported, similar to the peak of the outbreak last summer in Los Angeles. However, medical experts say the situation in California and Massachusetts is still better than what is happening in the mid-west and the deep-south, where states with lower vaccination rates are being harder hit in the latest wave, seeing more infections and deaths.

Many scientists worry that based on the latest trends, the U.S. might see COVID cases peak later this year; by mid-October there could be 240,000 daily infections and 4,000 deaths in the worst case scenario, according to the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub.
Yet the U.S. still doesn’t have a national strategy or effective national coordination to combat the virus like China does.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and the western countries are completely ignoring the voice of the more than 60 countries at the WHO, and the Chinese activists’ over 20 million petition.

Anti-science hurts the U.S. where COVID-19 cases and deaths are surging again this summer as the highly transmissible Delta variant is taking hold and vaccination efforts are stagnating in the country.

Along with the rapidly surging cases there is the increasingly fierce anti-vaccination campaign and demonization of scientists. The U.S. is wasting a lot of resources hiring neocon think tanks to push their bogus “Wuhan lab-leak” hoax led by the right-wing Republicans and Biden Democrats for their own selfish political goals. Instead they could be using these resources and efforts to design a better strategy to combat the virus and organize the nationwide vaccination efforts.

COVID is resurging again in the U.S. and Europe while China completely enjoys an almost virus-free summer party with a quick economic recovery; a cold winter is already waiting for the pandemic to go in the wrong direction in the U.S. and Europe.