Scott Morrison will not walk one inch down Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo’s conspiracy theory road, which holds that COVID-19 began life, or at least crossed from bats to humans, in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Morrison and Health Minister Greg Hunt should be applauded for demonstrating their independence from Washington, and their fidelity to the facts as they know them, when they repeatedly say, albeit in a low-key and non-confrontational way, that they have seen no evidence to suggest the virus began in a Chinese laboratory.
Consider what a strong repudiation of the Trump-Pompeo position this really is.
Trump and Pompeo have both said they have seen “enormous evidence” that the virus escaped from the Wuhan laboratory and went on to infect the world.
Pompeo is the most credible senior figure in the Trump administration on security matters and he is widely seen as a restraining influence on Trump.
But Pompeo has maintained his influence in part by never, ever contradicting Trump, or even distancing himself from the President in the slightest way.
The Trump administration cannot get any non-political person at the top of US intelligence to back their explosive claims.
American national security officials have said they believe the virus most likely crossed from bats to humans, possibly through another animal, at a wild meat wet market in Wuhan.
Even more important, US allies, both those within the Five Eyes group (US, Australia, UK, Canada, New Zealand) and those outside it, do not give any backing to the Trump-Pompeo line.
All the relevant Australian agencies have looked closely at the question and consulted all their counterpart allied agencies, including in the US, and the end of that process is the Australian assessment is there is no evidence that the virus came from the lab.
Of course it is possible that the virus came from the lab as it is virtually impossible to prove a negative.
What seems most likely is that Trump and Pompeo have translated a sliver of possibility into an “enormous amount of evidence”. For is it possible that Trump and Pompeo have seen conclusive evidence from the American system that they are prepared to refer to airily in press conferences, but which they have not yet shared, even in the most summary form, with their closest allies?
If the Americans had shared such evidence, allied leaders would be at worst saying things like: we don’t discuss intelligence.
The Australian agencies do not believe it is impossible the virus escaped into humans at a lab.
But there is no evidence for it. Nor did any of the international intelligence agencies see any of the kind of activity within the Chinese system that would necessarily follow such an incident.
The genuine, convincing, fact-based case against Beijing’s behaviour in the COVID-19 case is huge. Beijing knew about the pandemic and kept this knowledge from the world, which certainly caused needless deaths.
The US genuinely occupies the moral high ground if it makes its critique of Beijing along these lines.
But it is probably massively over-interpreting an intelligence “possibility” so that it has become, in Trumpland, a new truth.
Morrison and his government are right to go nowhere near these allegations, while at the same time avoiding gratuitous offence to Trump and his team.
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