CIA says lab leak likely, ChiComs decry politicization, conspiracy theories.
Posted by Ed Folsom, January 28, 2025
(Photo: February 3, 2021, Ng Han Guan/AP, via Al Jazeera)
This past weekend, news outlets reported that the CIA now assesses it likely that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a lab leak versus natural origin. The CIA previously took a neutral position. It now joins the FBI and U.S. Department of Energy in finding that a lab leak is the more likely source.
We have come a long way from the days when anyone who suggested that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab was denounced as a conspiracy theorist and when social media posts referring to a laboratory origin were roundly censored.
China vehemently objected to the CIA’s revised assessment, with language strikingly similar to the language used by U.S. authorities to censor and silence their own critics not all that long ago. According to a story in Al Jazeera, Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. responded to the CIA’s revised assessment this way:
“We firmly oppose the politicization and stigmatization of the source of the virus, and once again call on everyone to respect science and stay away from conspiracy theories.”
In this response, we have (1) an accusation that the virus, or at least its source, is being politicized by those who counter the Chinese Communist Party line, and (2) and a call for people to follow or respect the high-minded, objective path of “science” by adopting the Chinese Communist Party line, which (3) will require people to stay away from “conspiracy theories,” that is, COVID-19-origin theories that depart from the Chinese Communist Party line.
Coming from the Chinese Communist Party, it is easy to dismiss China’s rhetoric as the propaganda that it so obviously is. It is patently ridiculous for the Chinese Communists to hold themselves out as apolitical, objective pursuers of scientific inquiry and to dismiss lines of inquiry contrary to the official Communist Party line as conspiracy theories.
Inside China, however, the Communist Party exercises a degree of control that makes it much more difficult to dismiss its official party line. Information regarding a lab leak origin of COVID-19 is simply suppressed, censored. What news is anyone inside China allowed to hear or see, other than what supports the Communist Party line? Anyone who dares to speak anything to the contrary is punished, silenced, removed, or disappeared from the public square. In those circumstances, who even dares to speak? In this way, the Chinese Communist Party ensures that all discussions of the virus’s origin are depoliticized; “science” is respected; “conspiracy theorists” are marginalized and banished to places befitting such kooks.
Back in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, Anthony Fauci encouraged the writing and publication of a paper called Proximal Origins. The idea, according the paper’s key author, Jeremy Farrar, was to “effectively [put] to bed the issue of the origin of the virus” by disproving the lab leak theory and providing a “go to scientific statement to refer to.” Interestingly, Farrar expressed these goals in an email to Peter Daszak, then the president of EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. Daszik had been working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on gain-of-function research, to make bat viruses infectious to humans. Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health funded some of that research through grants to EcoHealth. For his part, Farrar had once been Daszak’s “chief collaborator” in a 2010 virus project in Vietnam, conducted by the forerunner of EcoHealth Alliance, the Wildlife Trust.
Farrar is now the chief scientific officer of the World Health Organization. Daszak and EcoHealth were both recently suspended from receiving government funding because EcoHealth “facilitated gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China without proper oversight and willingly violated multiple requirements of its multimillion-dollar National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant,” according to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Anthony Fauci recently accepted a blanket pardon from Joe Biden for all criminal conduct extending back to January 1, 2014.
In the wake of Proximal Origin’s publication, people who suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic probably originated with a Wuhan lab leak were branded conspiracy theorists. If they were scientists, they were marginalized and punished within the scientific community by cancellation and de-funding. Those who posted any such ideas on social media saw their posts censored by the platforms, in addition to being denounced as conspiracy theorists and science deniers. More broadly, U.S. health authorities and the Biden Administration labeled anyone who failed to follow its COVID-19 policy edicts “science deniers” – “Follow the science!” they told us ad nauseam.
Those who opposed the government’s policy edicts were accused of politicizing the virus. As is still the case in China, those who departed from the official line of the party in power were punished, silenced, removed from the public square by use of the very same agitprop slogans that the Chinese Communist Party uses against its party-line deviators to this day.
In the U.S., the fever that once gripped us has broken. The propaganda and punishment tools that still control in China have lost their power here. The government’s private sector collaborators have peeled away, and the people who so effectively wielded the machinery of authoritarian power and control have lost their iron grip. So, there’s hope.
Why did the interests of the Chinese Communist Party converge so thoroughly with those of the U.S. public health establishment and the Biden administration on matters of COVID-19’s origin and COVID-19 policy? In the recently-released House report “After Action Review of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward,” the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic found two likely reasons why Fauci and the authors of Proximal Origins wanted to kill the lab leak theory: (1) an interest in defending China, and (2) and an interest in reducing the likelihood of increased biosafety and laboratory regulations. That makes sense, for them and for the Chinese Communists.
Isn’t it something how the interests of the Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. health authorities also aligned right down to their speech-suppression and censorship tactics and the very language they used to bludgeon party-line heretics?
“We firmly oppose the politicization and stigmatization of the source of the virus, and once again call on everyone to respect science and stay away from conspiracy theories.”
