"Huge evidence". Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State for US President Donald Trump, wants to believe and make believe the theory of a laboratory accident in China which would be at the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. He even had, on Sunday April 3, accents from Georges W. Bush assuring, in 2002, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Like the former American president, Mike Pompeo refused to deliver the evidence in support of his assertion, asking, in essence, that we take his word for it.

The hypothesis that Sars-CoV-2, the virus behind Covid-19, has escaped from a Wuhan laboratory before contaminating more than 3.5 million people worldwide to date is not new and Beijing has repeatedly denied the allegations. She has been hanging around the corner of the conspiracy internet since the end of January. But it was only recently that it made its way to the highest levels of the American administration. President Donald Trump began speaking to him in public on April 18, before becoming more assertive on May 1, claiming that he too "saw the evidence" on the subject.

A conspiracy theory, two chapels

The laboratory in the White House's viewfinder is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which since 2015 has housed the only Chinese maximum security research center empowered to handle the most dangerous pathogens. Founded thanks to scientific support from France and American financial aid, this laboratory is directed by the Chinese virologist Shi Zengli, who has made tracking coronaviruses his specialty for fifteen years.

It was enough to awaken the vivid imagination of the conspirators. They are divided into two chapels: those who, like Steve Bannon, the former advisor to Donald Trump, want to believe that the Covid-19 is an experimental biological weapon that escaped its creators, and others , like Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who believes that it was an accident in an insufficiently secure institute.

These theories were fueled by the vagueness that still reigns around the origin of the epidemic. The hypothesis of the Wuhan market as the starting point for the health crisis, although commonly accepted, has in fact never been set up as absolute scientific truth, recalls the Hong Kong daily South China Morning Post. A Chinese study, published on January 24 in The Lancet, thus indicated that among the first cases of contamination in Wuhan, some seemed to have no proven link with the famous market. 

The suspicions hanging over the Chinese authorities, accused of having lacked transparency at the start of the epidemic, have added water to the mill of the conspirators. They saw it as a sign that Beijing was trying to hide some dark secret.

Diplomatic cables and "Five Eyes" report

But for this thesis to creep up and feed the Trump administration's anti-Chinese attacks, more solid elements were needed. There was first an article published on March 11 by the magazine Scientific American in which Shi Zengli, the director of the laboratory of Wuhan, admits having, at first, fears that the coronavirus has escaped from its research center . It does not matter that this virologist also claims to have acquired the assurance that none of the strains of coronavirus studied at the institute corresponded to that of the virus which took the world by storm. 

The US administration then found two diplomatic cables dating back to 2018 in which officials at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing warned Washington about "security concerns" at the Wuhan Virology Institute, Washington said. Post, April 14. No details on the nature of the concerns raised by the diplomats are given, and the article was published in the pages "opinions" and not news of the newspaper. Still, these "revelations" were widely reported in the US conservative media, including Fox News, which is reputed to be one of Donald Trump's main sources of information.

The same day that Mike Pompeo claimed to hold "evidence" concerning the role played by the laboratory in the origin of the epidemic, the Australian tabloid Daily Telegraph published an investigation which seems to go in the direction wanted by Washington. The conservative daily claims to have had a copy of a report of about fifteen pages of the intelligence services of the countries of the Group of five (the "Five Eyes", the intelligence alliance of the United States, of the United Kingdom , Australia, Canada and New Zealand) studying the accident track at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But, while recognizing that the work carried out on the coronaviruses in this laboratory presented a health risk, these spies concluded that there was hardly that 5% of risk that the current pandemic is due to a pathogenic agent which would have escaped from the laboratory. Only the Americans seemed more quick to blame the Chinese research center.

Against scientific evidence

The reasons why Americans find themselves isolated in their obstinacy in wanting to blame the epidemic on the Institute of Virology are first of all scientific. The hypothesis of a genetic manipulation that went wrong and gave birth to the Sars-CoV-2 collides with an abundant literature which demonstrates without the shadow of a doubt that the Covid-19 is of animal origin, underlines The Lancet. Otherwise, the analysis of the genome of this coronavirus would, if necessary, have found the trace of any human intervention, adds the prestigious British scientific journal.

The laboratory should therefore already have had Sars-CoV-2 in its possession, which Shi Zengli vigorously denied. The only related coronavirus strain that Chinese scientists at the Institute of Virology have worked on is 96% concordant with Covid-19. "This 4% discrepancy is equivalent to around 20 years of evolution of a virus," Vox Edward Holmes, an Australian virologist, told the site. There is therefore no chance that the two pathogens will be the same.

Finally, "if we do a little elementary math, it's pretty clear to see which track should be favored," says Peter Daszak, an epidemiologist who has worked for 15 years on infectious diseases in China, interviewed by Vox. "We can estimate that there are approximately between 1 and 7 million Chinese people who are infected each year by a virus which comes from a bat in the wild, whereas there are only a dozen people, very well protected, who are in contact with the coronaviruses in this laboratory. It is simply illogical to think that the virus comes from the Institute of virology rather than from nature, "he summarizes.

However, he acknowledges that there is no way to rule out 100% the possibility of accidental contamination. This is why this thesis is politically so attractive to a Donald Trump who, after having accused the Democrats of having overplayed the epidemic risk, after having blamed the supposedly too slow reaction of the World Health Organization, seems be found a new scapegoat. 

>> Denial champion against the Covid-19, Trump enters the campaign for his re-election

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