Coronavirus: Secrets, lies and tinfoil hats at 20 paces for the superpowers

Washington and Beijing have reason to be worried about the theory coronavirus was released from a Wuhan laboratory.

President Xi Jinping expelled accredited foreign journalists as the coronavirus spread around the world. Picture: AFP

Washington and Beijing have reason to be worried about the “tinfoil-hat” Wuhan lab coronavirus theory.

If COVID-19 actually was accidentally released from a lab in Wuhan — a not impossible but far from proven scenario — neither of the world’s superpowers would come out looking good on the current reported facts.

Take those now-infamous US State Department cables sent from Beijing to President Donald Trump’s Washington DC in January 2018.

Last week, The Washington Post reported that this trove of sensitive information was sent from America’s Beijing embassy after a team of US science diplomats visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The American experts were concerned about a lack of safety precautions being taken at the Wuhan lab, which was conducting experiments on — of all things — the potential human transmission of bat coronaviruses.

“They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on,” the Post quoted one US official as saying of the cables. The response by Australia’s major security ally? Less than nothing.

An aerial of the Wuhan lab. Picture: Supplied

No extra assistance was given to the labs and furthermore the Trump administration cut the China offices of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. More than two-thirds of staff at America’s top disease-fighting agency were stood down in the two years after those cables were sent, according to a report by Reuters. Some American health experts say those cuts to the number of American epidemiologists in China would not have changed anything during the pandemic.

“The problem was China, not that we didn’t have CDC people in China,” said Scott McNabb, a former CDC epidemiologist who is now a research professor with Emory University.

Those blaming China’s censorship for allowing the spread of the pandemic already had plenty of facts to work with before the laboratory leak theory gained credibility in DC and London, two capitals not exactly earning worldwide praise for their handling of COVID-19. Even China’s government admits that doctors in Wuhan — including the late Li Wenliang — were punished for talking about the disease.

As the coronavirus spread around the world, President Xi Jinping oversaw the biggest expulsion of accredited foreign journalists since Mao Zedong ruled the People’s Republic of China. And a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry even spread a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus originated in a US military lab.

Not the sort of behaviour to dampen interest in what went on in the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention that — in a tinfoil-hat mother lode — is located less than 300m from the seafood market linked to many of the earliest detected cases of the coronavirus. It clearly worried Shi Zhengli, an internationally respected virologist who works a few kilometres away, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab the Americans had visited before sending their concerned cables in early 2018.

“Could they have come from our lab?” Dr Shi admitted to wondering, in comments published in Scientific American.

Like Scott Morrison, she now believes the source for COVID-19 was “uncivilised living habits” linked to Chinese animal markets.

That the new coronavirus is the result of a lab malfunction is, she says, a “tinfoil-hat” theory.

It is a theory with attraction among pockets of the Trump administration.

That a study in The Lancet medical journal found many of the first patients infected with the coronavirus had no direct exposure to the Wuhan market is a useful Petri dish for the theory.

So is the almost 100-year history of the Chinese Communist Party, whose membership oath includes a commitment to “keep the Party’s secrets”. An inconvenient fact as Australia’s biggest trading partner tries to convince the world that, on the Wuhan lab at least, it is telling the truth.