It is obvious that political motivation has played a decisive role in the lab-leak theory, which has been hyped up by an intelligence report made with “low confidence,” despite scientific evidence pointing in the opposite direction.

LAB-LEAK hypothesis of coronavirus is the latest episode of the political games that have again been re­vived by certain US politicians to attack China under the guise of tracing the origins of COV­ID-19.

The scientific community and scientific evidence related to the matter, which should have been at the center of focus, have been absent or neglected in this repeated farce.

The US House of Repre­sentatives held a hearing on the origins of COVID-19 on 8 March, following a classified intelligence report by the US Department of Energy suggest­ing that the virus probably came from a lab leak, despite the fact that the department made its updated judgement with “low confidence.”

A heavy dose of political theatre

“The hearing itself, howev­er, offered a heavy dose of polit­ical theatre, giving a preview of sessions to follow in the weeks and months to come,” the sci­entific journal Nature reported.

According to the report, three out of four witnesses at the hearing supported the lab-leak hypothesis, but their credi­bility is doubted by the scientific community.

“Not one of those witness­es had any scientific record of investigating and publish­ing peer-reviewed research on the origins of this virus in quality journals,” said Michael Worobey, a biologist at the Uni­versity of Arizona who has stud­ied genetic evidence since the early days of the pandemic.

Science, another major ac­ademic publisher, reported on the hearing under the headline “Science takes back seat to pol­itics in first House hearing on origin of COVID-19 pandemic.”

It is obvious that political motivation has played a deci­sive role in the lab-leak theory, which has been hyped up by an intelligence report made with “low confidence,” despite sci­entific evidence pointing in the opposite direction.

“Low confidence” means the information obtained “is not enough or is too fragmented to make a definitive analytic judge­ment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion,” ac­cording to a CNN report.

A science-based report

A science-based report published by an expert panel in Science magazine in Octo­ber 2022 overwhelmingly sup­ported zoonotic hypotheses and concluded that the COVID-19 virus likely spread naturally in a zoonotic jump from an animal to humans, without help from a lab.

Fabian Leendertz, a zoonot­ic disease expert, said that a laboratory leak as the possible origin of the COVID-19 pandem­ic is a “purely politically moti­vated” theory, and that political power games are behind it.

The expert, who partici­pated in the World Health Or­ganization’s (WHO) search for the origins of the coronavirus, recently told the German Press Agency that he is aware of no new data that would strength­en the laboratory hypothesis. “It remains the most unlikely hypothesis of all.”

Chinese evolutionary biol­ogist Wu Chung-I said claims that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was made by humans represent a terrible regression in scientific thinking — a regression to the level of a priest more than 200 years ago.

No factual or scientific basis

Polish virologist Agnieszka Szuster-Ciesielska recently said in an interview that the COV­ID-19 lab-leak theory, which has been rehashed by the US Department of Energy and the FBI, is sensation-seeking and has no factual or scientific ba­sis.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning has urged the United States to im­mediately cease its political manipulation of COVID-19 or­igins-tracing, and voluntarily share its data on suspected ear­ly cases in the United States with the WHO.

For some time now, the United States has been polit­icizing, weaponizing and in­strumentalizing COVID-19 or­igins-tracing, Mao said. It has allowed a matter of science to become dominated by lawmak­ers and the intelligence commu­nity, and it has spread myths such as the lab-leak theory without any evidence in order to discredit and attack China.

Source : Xinhua