Christopher Pyne: The relationship between the US and China is fraught enough already

The US president has put the origin of Covid-19 back in the spotlight, but he may provoke a reaction that no one wants to see, writes Christopher Pyne.

This is my one hundredth Pyne on Monday column! It’s not quite a one hundredth birthday so I won’t be getting a letter from Australia’s head of state, the Queen, but I thought it was worth noting nonetheless.

Thank you for reading it and commenting on it with such candour.

Apart from a number of columns in 2020, I have avoided writing incessantly about the coronavirus pandemic.

Mostly because everyone else seems to write about the subject, but also because it’s been such a nightmare for so many since February 2020 that I choose to write about many other topics to draw our minds away from it. But not today.

The President of the United States, Joe Biden, has rather startlingly put the issue of the origin of the Covid-19 virus back in the spotlight.

US President Joe Biden. Picture: AFP

He has asked the intelligence agencies in the US government to collaborate on giving him definitive answers on where the virus originated, setting a deadline of 90 days from last week.

He has taken this action because the hitherto accepted wisdom that the virus originated in bats or pangolins and transferred to humans through contact in the Huanan wet markets has been challenged – and not by easily dismissed conspiracy theorists.

There are now respected authorities in the US that believe there is credible evidence that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Biden wants to get to the truth.

The theory goes that the Wuhan Institute was doing research on a virus very much like the coronavirus.

The theory continues that the laboratories were poorly administered and did not adopt the best practices necessary to contain their dangerous work.

It is even proposed that the American diplomats in Beijing were so concerned about the dangers presented by the management of the Wuhan Institute that they cabled back to Washington DC and suggested the US Government offer to help the Chinese Government fix the problems inherent there.

It isn’t suggested that the virus was released deliberately but that workers at the Wuhan Institute presented at a local hospital with symptoms in December 2019, and that from there the contagion spread like a wild fire.

The World Health Organisation China Study into the origin of the virus noted that the Chinese Centre for Disease Control laboratory, which is associated with the Wuhan Institute, was relocated to a new site near the Huanan wet market on December 2, 2019.

The study also concluded that the origin of the virus was probably animal to human transmission and that the “introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway”.

If the Biden administration is going to argue otherwise, it will have to have very convincing evidence.

The last thing the world needs now is a smear of the Chinese government by the US government.

The relationship between the two countries is fraught enough already. There must be facts to back up any theory.

China would not be the first and isn’t the only country in the world that researches biological agents.

It might be because such countries wish to use them in the event of war, or it might be because they want to know how to respond to an attack on their own military or population with biological weapons.

The Chinese government denies this absolutely.

They have consistently maintained that the virus may well have originated in another country and that while it took off in Wuhan, they don’t accept that the source was from there.

If the US can prove otherwise and if it turns out to be true that a global pandemic that has ruthlessly spread across the world killing at least three million humans started in the Wuhan Institute of Virology – and it’s a big if – it will have devastating consequences for the way China is viewed around the world.

Many will cast doubt on whatever evidence the US does or doesn’t produce. China’s allies and friends, and those who loathe the US, won’t accept it. There are those who blame the US for the leaves falling from the trees in autumn.

But regardless of that, such an outcome would open a fissure between China and the rest of the world which would be hard to heal. It would be a history defining moment.

For the sake of peace, I hope that a pangolin or bat did it.

While we certainly must get to the bottom of the source of what has been a shocking blight on our globe, it would be a lot easier for the pacific relationships of nations across the world if we can truthfully blame it on a bat or a pangolin that can’t speak in its defence.