Covid-19 origin saga a grim tale of CCP stonewalling

The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China's central Hubei province. Picture: AFP

The US Department of Energy has concluded that the Covid-19 pandemic likely originated from a research accident in a Chinese lab. While the DoE asserts this conclusion with “low confidence”, it now joins the FBI, which has come to the same conclusion with confidence in the “moderate” range.

“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” FBI director Christopher Wray told Fox News on Tuesday.

The US intelligence agencies have not reached a consensus on the lab leak hypothesis, however. The CIA says it doesn’t know where Covid came from and White House national security spokesman John Kirby has said the Biden administration hasn’t reached a consensus on Covid’s origins.

But while the FBI has been conducting its own investigation into Covid’s origins since 2020, the DoE is uniquely placed to assess crucial evidence.

The DoE’s Sandia National Laboratories, built during World War II in conjunction with the Manhattan Project, provide scientific support to America’s national security program. The labs develop technologies in biodefence and the understanding of infectious diseases – both naturally occurring and man-made. If the US has technologies that can identify whether a virus is wholly or partially synthetic, these labs are likely to have them.

Of course, we do not know how the release of this new information relates to the recent spy-balloon incident or China’s apparent plan to supply Russia with hundreds of suicide drones by April. Some analysts have described the timing of the announcement as “interesting”. But while the timing may indeed be interesting from a strategic perspective, it is a reminder of the high price Australia paid for simply asking the question of where Covid originated.

Although it brought us pain, it was courageous for Marise Payne, the foreign minister at the time, to call for an investigation into the origins of Covid-19 in the early stages of the pandemic. Crucially, Payne suggested the World Health Organisation should not be in charge of such an investigation – a suggestion that would prove to be prescient. Payne also was backed by Chris Bowen, in a commendable display of bipartisan support.

In early 2020, Scott Morrison telephoned world leaders to discuss the WHO – including a proposed plan for reforming its governance. Morrison advocated for outbreak investigators, much like weapons inspectors, who could be dispatched to collect evidence vital to global security.

Addressing a press conference in Canberra in April 2020, Morrison said: “The implications and impacts of this (virus) are extraordinary … it would seem entirely reasonable and sensible that the world would want to have an independent assessment of how this all occurred, so we can learn the lessons and prevent it from happening again.”

Of course, we know what happened next. China initiated a trade war against Australia and imposed sanctions on Australian products from beef and lamb to timber and wine. Trawlers full of lobster sat idle off Australian ports. And a Chinese Communist Party official shared a doctored image depicting an Australian soldier slitting the throat of an Afghan child. Students were warned that they might be subjected to “racist incidents” in Australia. And Hu Xijin, of the Global Times, described Australia as “the gum stuck to China’s shoe”.

Steadfast in the face of economic coercion, Morrison repeated his call for a thorough investigation into the origins of Covid in September 2020 at the UN General Assembly in Manhattan: “This virus has inflicted a calamity on our world and its peoples. We must do all we can to understand what happened for no other purpose than to prevent it from happening again.”

In January 2021, the WHO began its investigation into the origins of Covid. But it did not possess the powers that Morrison had lobbied for. The WHO failed to secure data from Beijing and concluded its investigation by coming to no conclusion. WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus explained when he released his report that “as far as WHO is concerned all hypotheses remain on the table”. It was all for nothing.

In the wake of the WHO’s unconvincing report, CCP officials maintain that Covid-19 did not originate from a laboratory in Wuhan and have even suggested the virus originated from US labs in Fort Detrick instead. But as Sharri Markson reported for The Australian in 2021, US intelligence agencies know that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalised with respiratory illnesses in November 2019 – just one month before the Chinese government reported the first cases of Covid.

We may never know what real­ly happened in Wuhan. But we do know CCP officials have a pattern of spreading disinformation about Covid and will describe surveillance airships travelling into the territory of other nations as weather balloons, with apparently no shame.

To date, more than 19,000 Australians have died from Covid. While official records indicate that at least 6.9 million confirmed deaths have occurred worldwide, The Economist estimates that the real figure is two to four times higher. The US, the richest nation in the world, estimates that 1.1 million of its citizens have died.

While the Australian government may have made several mistakes during the pandemic, urging China to be transparent was not one of them.

Claire Lehmann is the founding editor of Quillette.