The
United States is losing the ability for
rational political debate and respect
for science. Politicians, media and
public discourse have been infected by
lies, conspiracies, racial stereotyping
of nations like China, and rampant
hostility.
July31, 2021 -
The World Health Organization seems to have
succumbed to U.S. pressure to falsely
incriminate China over the Covid-19 global
pandemic.
The United Nations-affiliated body has called
for a Phase Two study of laboratories and
markets in the Chinese city of Wuhan where early
Covid-19 cases were detected in December 2019.
Beijing has
rebuffed the call, saying that the proposed
investigation is a cover for politicizing the
pandemic along the lines pushed by Washington.
What has happened at the WHO? An earlier
survey by WHO and Chinese scientists published
in February this year
concluded it was “extremely unlikely” that
the novel coronavirus escaped from the Wuhan
Institute of Virology. But now the WHO is
recommending a follow-up study as if casting
doubt on its previous findings. Beijing says
this is an undue sole focus on China.
Two factors seem relevant here. Under
President Joe Biden’s administration, the United
States has rejoined membership of the WHO. His
predecessor Donald Trump had pulled the U.S. out
of the international body, claiming that it was
too close to China and was concealing the
origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. The United
States is the main source of funding for the
WHO, so its return will be a welcome move and no
doubt has influenced the executive to be more
favorable to American claims about the pandemic.
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Biden and the U.S. media have remarkably
revived the baseless conspiracy theory
instigated by Trump and his rightwing
Republicans that China was the origin of
Covid-19 through a “leak” of the virus from the
Wuhan institute. Biden has tasked U.S.
intelligence agencies to report back in the
coming weeks. It’s not hard to imagine how the
intelligence will be made to fit the political
agenda of smearing China.
Beijing says, with fair reason, that the
Americans are putting politics above science in
order to undermine China in the greater scheme
of geopolitical rivalry. The Chinese are calling
for an international and cooperative
investigation to objectively determine the
origin of the Covid-19 pandemic which has
resulted in over four millions deaths worldwide
over the past year.
Washington is coming from the premise that
the disease is China’s fault, and so it is
pushing the focus of investigation entirely on
China and locations in Wuhan. This prejudice is
unscientific and seems geared to consolidate the
conspiracy theory that the Wuhan laboratory was
the source of the pandemic through a release of
the virus.
The political atmosphere in the U.S. has
become extremely toxic. Last week during Senate
hearings, the top American expert on infectious
diseases Anthony Fauci was assailed by reckless
accusations that he was complicit in the
alleged Wuhan “lab leak” and responsible for all
deaths.
The United States is losing the ability for
rational political debate and respect for
science. Politicians, media and public discourse
have been infected by lies, conspiracies, racial
stereotyping of nations like China (Russia, Iran
and others), and rampant hostility. America’s
much-vaunted democracy is a scrap heap of
seething enmity which blocks any reasonable
solutions to its many domestic social challenges
as well as the conduct of civil international
relations.
Obscene social inequality, lack of political
leadership and lack of public trust in
governance have resulted in the most shameful
record. The U.S. death toll from the pandemic is
over 620,000 – way above any other nation. That
is an indictment of the failure of “American
democracy” and its capitalist-oligarchic
society.
Yet the Americans keep pushing the conspiracy
that it’s all China’s fault. That country with
nearly four times the U.S. population has
incurred a tiny fraction (less than 1 percent )
of the American death toll from Covid-19. That
success is down to good centrally planned
governance of China’s socialist system and
national unity of purpose to contain the
disease. Chinese people don’t question basic
science such as efficacy of wearing face masks
in public spaces or availing of vaccines. By
contrast, American society is riven and racked
by ignorance, selfishness and loony
irrationality about so-called “freedoms”.
A productive, genuinely international effort
to locate the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic
would be open to all leads for inquiry.
The unilateral demands by Washington to limit
the investigation to the facilities in Wuhan are
based on conspiratorial thinking and motivated
by an effort to incriminate China.
Admittedly, the first reported cases of
Covid-19 were detected in Wuhan in December
2019. But that does necessarily mean the
pandemic originated there. There are reports of
the disease emerging weeks before that date in
North America and Europe. But these cases were
either misdiagnosed or under-reported. During
2019 there was a
surge in seasonal influenza deaths in the
United States. Perhaps some of these cases were
not due to the normal flu virus but rather to
Covid-19 which has similar symptoms.
China is calling for a wider investigation in
which biomedical samples in the U.S. and Europe
are retrospectively analyzed for possible
infection with Covid-19.
Another major factor deserving international
scrutiny is Fort Detrick, the U.S. military
biowarfare laboratory in Maryland. This facility
is believed to experiment with lethal pathogens,
including novel coronaviruses.
Fort Detrick has a
notorious record for safety failures going
back to the Cold War decades. In August 2019,
the laboratory was forced to
shut down for several months after it was
discovered its waste disposal processes had been
compromised by failure. It is still not clear
what that failure was due to exactly or what
pathogens may have escaped.
But think about that. Such a grave breakdown
in one of the most toxic centers on the planet
preceded by only a few months the global
pandemic. To a rational mind, that fact merits
an international investigation for possible role
in the origin of Covid-19. China’s government
and many other nations have
called on the WHO to open a probe into Fort
Detrick. But the Americans point-blank refuse.
American arrogance and provocative
politicization over the pandemic is endangering
international relations and preventing an
effective scientific approach towards
eradicating a disease that has wrought so much
misery on its own nation. The ultimate downfall
from such hubris is the self-inflicted damage.