(International Watch) Why does the world pay attention to those biological laboratories in the United States?
China News Agency, Beijing, March 13 Question: Why does the world pay attention to those biological laboratories in the United States?
China News Agency reporter Wu Xu
At present, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is still continuing, but it has brought out an "unspoken secret" of the United States.
The Russian Ministry of Defense recently released a number of documents revealing that the United States is conducting "biological weapons research" in Ukraine.
The U.N. Security Council then held a meeting to consider Ukraine's biosecurity issue, at which Russia and the United States blamed each other.
The U.S. representative said that the purpose of Russia's request for a meeting was to "spread false information."
The representative of the Russian side hit back, saying, "The louder the voice that tries to shirk responsibility, the more it shows that the problem is hit."
The information released by the Russian side has aroused strong attention from the outside world.
For a long time, the United States has attached great importance to research in the field of biology, and has set up a large number of biological laboratories around the world, but its internal information has not been disclosed to the public.
Under this premise, the outside world has always had doubts about biological laboratories in the United States.
U.S. officials expressed mixed opinions
According to data previously released by the United States, the United States has 26 biological laboratories in Ukraine, and the US Department of Defense has absolute control.
The Russian government has been emphasizing Russia's concerns, accusing the United States of opening laboratories near its border.
According to the latest information released by the Russian side, more than 30 biological laboratories have been discovered in Ukraine and relevant documents have been obtained. These laboratories have invested more than 200 million US dollars.
On February 27, the US "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" published an interview with Robert Pope, the head of the US Department of Defense's "Threat Reduction Cooperation Program".
Pope said that the war in Ukraine may endanger the safety of biological laboratories in Ukraine and the United States, and the personnel of these laboratories in the United States and Ukraine have been lost.
In the interview, Pope did not deny the existence of U.S. biological laboratories in Ukraine, but emphasized that these laboratories are only used for scientific research and disease monitoring for peaceful purposes.
The official website of the US embassy in Ukraine once published the list of these biological laboratories, but the US side later deleted the relevant information on the official website of the embassy.
After Russia disclosed documents related to the biological experiments carried out by the United States in Ukraine, the website of the US embassy in Ukraine has been unable to directly access the above information.
The documents released by the Russian Ministry of Defense this time mainly exposed the biological weapons research carried out by the United States and its NATO allies in Ukraine, including multiple projects to study "pathogens such as bacteria and viruses that can be transmitted from bats to humans".
The Russian military said that a large number of dangerous viruses are stored in these biological laboratories, and the United States uses these facilities to carry out biological military programs.
What makes the outside world puzzled is that after the relevant situation was exposed by the Russian side, several U.S. officials made inconsistent and contradictory statements on this.
At the beginning, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Newland said at a congressional hearing that Ukraine has biological research facilities, and the U.S. side is cooperating with the Ukrainian side to prevent research materials from falling into the hands of the Russian military.
U.S. National Intelligence Director Haynes also said that the United States "is" or "at least has" provided assistance to biological laboratories that exist in Ukraine.
However, US State Department spokesman Price emphasized at a press conference that the United States does not "operate" biological laboratories in Ukraine.
He also said that the U.S. "participation" in the Ukrainian biolab goes beyond occasional help in ensuring safety.
"Black material" frequently raises doubts
Whether the U.S. military has a biological laboratory in Ukraine has been the focus of many debates between Russia, Ukraine, Russia and the United States in recent years.
Ukraine's Interfax news agency reported in May 2020 that part of the U.S.-Ukraine agreement was only aimed at modernizing laboratories in Odessa, Kharkov, Lviv, Kyiv and other regions.
Russia's "Komsomolskaya Pravda" reported that the statement was concentrated in May 2020 because at the peak of the new crown epidemic, the Ukrainian opposition raised a question in the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament): U.S. secrets in Ukraine What exactly is a biological laboratory doing?
According to the report, Ukrainian opposition lawmakers’ unease about the U.S. laboratory comes from some situations that have occurred in Ukraine in recent years.
In Kharkiv in 2016, about 20 Ukrainian soldiers died after being exposed to a flu-like virus, and another 200 were hospitalized.
About a year later, in the same city, many people were infected with cholera, and cholera and hepatitis A viruses were found in contaminated drinking water.
Because there is a biological laboratory built by the US Department of Defense's "Threat Reduction Cooperation Program", some Ukrainian congressmen believe that this is "man-made" biological materials for research.
According to the information released by the US government, the US Department of Defense currently controls 336 biological laboratories in 30 countries around the world in the name of "cooperating to reduce biosecurity risks" and "strengthening global public health".
According to reports, large-scale infectious disease outbreaks have occurred in many laboratory locations, so there have been voices questioning the chaos of laboratory management, resulting in frequent accidents.
182 to 1 draws international concern
Although the U.S. government claims that the laboratory built in "cooperation" with Ukraine is to provide "scientific research support" in "public health" for the Ukrainian people, it has not easily won the trust of the international community.
On the one hand, it is because of the many suspicious behaviors and past bad deeds of the United States on the issue of biological weapons.
The United States is by far the only country that still possesses chemical weapons.
Although the prohibition of biological and chemical weapons is a world consensus, it is expressly bound by two important international treaties, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention.
However, in the past 20 years, the United States has gone against the international consensus and independently opposed the establishment of a multilateral verification mechanism.
In May 2021, the Organization for the Prohibition of Biological Weapons hopes to strengthen the supervision and implementation of the Convention, and decided to establish a new verification mechanism to ensure that States parties implement their commitments not to study chemical weapons.
A total of 183 countries participated in the vote, 182 countries agreed, and only the United States voted against it.
This move is intriguing and should be vigilant.
Biological weapons are weapons of mass destruction, and any information and clues about biological military activities should arouse the high concern of the international community.
According to Reuters, at present, the WHO has made a statement on related issues, hoping that the biological laboratory in Ukraine will take action to destroy the dangerous pathogens stored in the laboratory, so as to ensure the safety of the overall situation and avoid the The further spread of the war has caused these dangerous pathogens to endanger the lives of people in the surrounding areas.
Faced with the serious concerns of the international community, as a self-proclaimed "responsible" big country, the United States should think about how to correctly handle the international community's verification of the US biological laboratory.
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