Trump shuts US research lab linked by China to Covid-origin

In a boost to the Chinese narrative on Covid-19, US President Donald Trump has ordered the closure of a biological laboratory that China has falsely linked to the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 disease.

Covid-19 emerged in China’s Wuhan in 2019 and became a global pandemic as China did not take any preventive measures and allowed infected people to travel out of Wuhan to the rest of the world. China did not share any information about the virus for weeks and kept the world in dark.

The Trump administration ordered the closure of the Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Maryland by 5 pm on April 29, according to WIRED.

ALSO READ: 5 years later, smoking gun points to China’s Wuhan lab in search of Covid-19 origin

The IRF is a biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) laboratory that conducts research on SARS-CoV-2, Ebola, encephalitis, and other viruses. It is located inside the US Army base at Fort Detrick. It comes under the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and works on emerging infectious diseases and biodefence.

The very next day, China published a white paper that falsely linked the lab to the origin of Covid-19.So far, all the evidence suggests that the virus originated in China.

The evidence suggests that an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where scientists had been conducting risky research for years, leaked the virus that caused the worldwide pandemic. There is no evidence yet of natural-origin neither in China nor abroad. At least three US intelligence agencies have said the virus most likely originated in a lab in China.

Trump administration cites safety concerns to shut down lab

The Trump administration has cited safety concerns for shutting down the lab at Maryland.

The NIH told WIRED that the shutdown was a result of personnel issues at the lab that “compromised the facility’s safety culture, prompting this research pause”.

“During the stand-down, no research will be conducted, and access will be limited to essential personnel only, to safeguard the facility and its resources,” the NIH further said.

ALSO READ: US documents sharpen lens on China’s Wuhan lab amid post-Covid scrutiny of coronavirus research

The closure of the lab has come at a time when the Trump administration is dismantling the federal government in efforts led by billionaire Elon Musk. A host of science projects have been shut down or reduced to minimal size and a host of scientists and researchers have been fired. Most of the science programmes closed are about healthcare, emerging diseases, and climate change.

China falsely links lab to Covid-origin

China on April 30 published a paper, titled ‘Covid-19 Prevention, Control and Origins Tracing: China’s Actions and Stance’, in which the regime published a litany of falsehoods about how it managed the Covid-19 outbreak and falsely claimed that the virus likely originated in the United States.

The propaganda piece, published by Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua, claimed that “numerous studies have shown that SARS-CoV-2 originated outside China” and said that “substantial evidence suggested the COVID-19 might have emerged in the United States earlier than its officially-claimed timeline, and earlier than the outbreak in China”.

During May-October 2019, the US state of Virgina reported 19 outbreaks of respiratory illness — higher than usual for the time of year. At least 82 people fell sick in one cluster and three of them died. Overall, the authorities said dozens of people were infected. Symptoms in the outbreak included cough, fever, and pneumonia. All of these symptoms resemble that of Covid-19 but also a host of other non-Covid respiratory diseases.

In the white paper, China referred to the Virgina outbreak and some other respiratory disease outbreaks and said those were likely the first instances of Covid-19 circulating without being tested. The paper linked the outbreak to the Fort Detrick lab that Trump has now shut down.

The white paper said, “In July 2019, two communities in northern Virginia reported outbreaks of pneumonia with unknown causes, which local media suspected to be ‘a mystery virus’. A total of 54 people exhibited symptoms such as fever, coughing, and feableness, resulting in two deaths. That same month, the Fort Detrick Biological Laboratory, located just one hour’s drive from the affected area, was suddenly shut down.”

The white paper further claimed that “China shared the epidemic information with the WHO [World Health Organization] and the international community in a timely manner, and provided the genome sequence of the virus”. These are blatant lies.

As Firstpost has previously reported, China learnt by December 27, 2019, that a new coronavirus was behind the outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan and it was spreading from one person to another. By that time, China had also mapped the genome of the virus. However, China only alerted the WHO about the outbreak on December 31 and a Chinese scientist in partnership with a British scientist uploaded the genome privately on the internet.

It was through that private post on the internet that the world learnt of the SARS-CoV-2’s genome, not through the transparency of the Chinese regime.

Despite knowing in December that the virus was spreading person to person, China only told this to the WHO on January 20. By then, millions of people had carried out the virus from China to the rest of the world.

ALSO READ: ‘Millions could’ve been saved if Chinese were transparent’: The Seeker, Indian whistleblower, who exposed Covid-19 cover-up

Through its deliberate cations, the Chinese regime turned a city outbreak into a global pandemic, said Jamie Metzl, a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a specialist on China who has previously served at the US Department of State and White House.

In any other open country, such as the United States, the authorities would have taken the logical steps of alerting the world and sharing the genome at once and the novel coronavirus outbreak would have been little more than a kitchen fire, said Metzl in an earlier interview.

“The Chinese government turned the equivalent of a stove fire into a kitchen fire, the kitchen fire into a city fire, and the city fire into ultimately a global inferno. In the critical first days and weeks, the Chinese government did everything wrong and everything possible for political purposes to prevent the kind of response that was so urgently needed. If not for the unique pathologies of the Chinese state, there almost certainly would not have been a pandemic,” said Metzl.