Antinuclear

Australian news, and some related international items

US fails to provide evidence for COVID-19 “lab leak” claims

The reason why the US intelligence agencies failed to find anything is simple: There is no evidence, secret or otherwise, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has anything to do with the origins of COVID-19.

More than half a year since the Trump State Department released a fact sheet claiming that researchers at the WIV showed symptoms, prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, “consistent with… common seasonal illnesses,” there has not been a single piece of evidence—whether made public or even hinted at–that substantiates the lab leak “theory.

In March of this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of COVID-19 said in its report that it had seriously considered the lab leak hypothesis but declared it “extremely unlikely” based on the absence of evidence. The report expressed willingness to follow up on “new evidence supplied around possible laboratory leaks,” but since then, none has been provided.

US fails to provide evidence for COVID-19 “lab leak” claims, WSWS, Andre Damon @Andre__Damon, 25 August 2021  On May 25, US President Joe Biden publicly embraced the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 may have been released from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, ordering the US intelligence agencies to produce a report within 90 days into the potentially man-made origins of the disease.

Three months later, the US intelligence agencies have failed to produce a shred of evidence to substantiate claims by the Trump administration, Biden administration and every major US media outlet that a lab leak is a “plausible” scenario.This was despite what was, according to media reports, a “giant” US effort. On August 5, CNN reported that the US was examining “a giant catalog of information [that] contains genetic blueprints drawn from virus samples studied at the lab in Wuhan, China.”
To process the massive amount of data in its possession, US intelligence agencies were “relying on supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Labs, a collection of 17 elite government research institutions.”In its reporting, CNN strongly indicated that the United States had carried out a cyberattack on medical and scientific institutions, writing “the machines involved in creating and processing this kind of genetic data from viruses are typically connected to external cloud-based servers—leaving open the possibility they were hacked.”

And after all this, what are the findings? The report was, in the massaged words of the New York Times write-up, defined by an “absence of conclusions.” It did not, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, “yield a definitive conclusion.” Both newspapers claim to be passing on the statements of “senior officials.”

The Times and the Journal claim that the intelligence agencies could not come to a conclusion due to “China’s refusal to continue to cooperate with international investigations” and China’s refusal to “give access to certain data sets.”

However, neither report mentioned CNN’s reporting about US access to a “giant” catalog of secret data, and why, if the US had access to the data being “hidden” by China, nothing was found.

The reason why the US intelligence agencies failed to find anything is simple: There is no evidence, secret or otherwise, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has anything to do with the origins of COVID-19.

More than half a year since the Trump State Department released a fact sheet claiming that researchers at the WIV showed symptoms, prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, “consistent with… common seasonal illnesses,” there has not been a single piece of evidence—whether made public or even hinted at–that substantiates the lab leak “theory.”

In March of this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of COVID-19 said in its report that it had seriously considered the lab leak hypothesis but declared it “extremely unlikely” based on the absence of evidence. The report expressed willingness to follow up on “new evidence supplied around possible laboratory leaks,” but since then, none has been provided.

The members of the team “found no evidence for leads to follow up,” and that remains so to this day, they wrote in an article published in Nature on Wednesday, timed to correspond with the submission of the intelligence agencies’ report…………  https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/08/26/pers-a26.html

August 28, 2021 - Posted by | Uncategorized

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