When the Scandal of the Century Has No Consequences

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 15, 2023

 

Since at least 2017, China’s People’s Liberation Army has been engaged in virology research with potential military applications at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), according to an investigative report published this week in the Times of London. And according to the secret Chinese communications intercepted by U.S. investigators that inform the Times report, this “covert project of dangerous experiments” being conducted at the infamous lab was likely a direct predicate for the global outbreak of Covid-19.

 

The report indicates that some of the first patients to be sickened with the virus that disrupted life across the planet and cost the lives of millions were scientists researching the disease at the WIV. Those scientists were reportedly engaged in gain-of-function experiments, in which pathogens are genetically altered to increase the risks associated with infection in an effort to better understand how to mitigate those risks. And when the researchers — relatively young and healthy adults — became so sick with a flu-like illness in the fall of 2019 that they required hospitalization, Chinese officials did not appear to be confused about the nature of the problem on their hands.

 

Chinese officials locked down a previously accessible public coronavirus database in September 2019, altered its data to hide the pathogen’s origins, and subsequently took it offline altogether. More chillingly, when Chinese officials eventually revealed the genomic sequence of the virus they had been studying, it led investigators to speculate about the PLA’s apocalyptic objectives:

 

The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.

 

“Despite presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military,” said a State Department investigator summarizing the conclusions to which the government’s inquiry led. “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation, and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

 

Previously unreleased State Department cables obtained by a journalistic nonprofit reveal the extent of the PLA’s investment in “shadow labs” at the WIV. Those dispatches contradict claims from Chinese officials and the WIV’s Western financiers, such as EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak, who dismissed the prospect that classified civilian-military biological research was ongoing at the institute and could have produced the virus that was a precursor to SARS-CoV-2.

 

One heavily redacted internal State Department document contains the following headlines: “Who ordered the cover up? The signs point to Beijing, not local officials”; “Beijing knew earlier than they admit”; “leaked directive confirms Beijing restricted disclosure of virus information and samples”; “Xi [Jinping] lied to obfuscate his role in the cover-up”; and, perhaps most damning of all, “Initial outbreak could have been contained in China if Beijing had not covered it up.”

 

An informed reader will likely look at this incomplete but highly indicative set of data and conclude that the pandemic that stole years of his life, stultified his children’s development, restricted his access to his loved ones, and maybe even took them from him was avoidable. A conspiracy executed by the unscrupulous and paranoid Chinese Communist Party backed by funding from, among others, American public-health institutions created the conditions for Covid to spread across the globe. And when the outbreak was upon us, these same forces worked diligently to obfuscate their roles in its origins. Even granting that there is much we still do not know about the source of this disease and the horrors it wrought, these revelations alone are sufficient to deem this the scandal of the century. But as a partisan cudgel, the scandal no longer has much use.

 

Why? Because the U.S. executive agencies that helped fund what was apparently PLA-linked research at the WIV, including research on a pathogen that is 96 percent similar to the Covid-19 virus, provided that help in the Trump years. And while Beijing was covering up the emerging plague, Trump himself echoed the assurances the Chinese Communist Party was providing the rest of the world. He boosted the “terrific” Xi as “a man who truly loves his country,” assured Americans that China was “working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” and marveled at the “great discipline” that produced the Potemkin public-health projects designed to fool the globe into believing the CCP was taking Covid seriously.

 

We can’t expect partisan Republicans and their media organs to promote these revelations with excessive enthusiasm. Nor will most of Donald Trump’s challengers emphasize too strenuously the former president’s complicity, because to even hint at the notion that Trump was anything other than a victim of his own administration is to be tarred by the loudest voices on the right as suspiciously in thrall to leftist narratives.

 

Conservative media have already imbibed the intoxicating vindication provided by the low-confidence conclusions U.S. agencies drew earlier this year about the veracity of the “lab-leak theory.” In 2020, Democratic partisans and lawmakers summarily dismissed the notion that this uniquely infectious pathogen had genetic markers suggestive of artificial origins from the outset of the pandemic, insisting it was a biproduct of the Right’s addiction to culture warring and racial hostility. The Right has already dunked all over everyone who deserves it. The marketplace of conservative commentary is saturated with schadenfreude, and polemicists with their finger on the conservative pulse know there is little appetite for more of the same.

 

Democrats, too, have few incentives to get to the bottom of this conspiracy or promote what they find down there. The same dynamics that have rendered Republicans hostage to the amateur partisan communications flacks who populate social media are at work in staying the hands of concerned Democrats. Democratic professionals and lawmakers will reap no rewards from critically reflecting on the statements of their dashboard saints, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, who heaped condescension on those who lent credence to the lab-leak theory or questioned the value of gain-of-function research. To reverse course now would be to take a sledgehammer to the foundational premises of technocracy itself, and the presumption that enlightened social engineers with the proper pedigrees can safely ignore the shouting from the cheap seats.

 

Today, the Biden administration seems committed to engineering a rapprochement with Beijing. It has already forgotten the brazen Chinese military incursion into U.S. airspace in February — a violation of U.S. sovereignty that it resolved with an AIM-9X missile. It won’t upset the applecart now by risking a public fracas over China’s complicity in the onset of a global pandemic.

 

Both Democratic and Republican partisans have few incentives to appear scandalized by these revelations. Neither party’s activists enjoy the psychological satisfaction associated with hammering their domestic political opponents over this. It’s too stale to juice the cycle of dunking and debunking typical of any modern political controversy. And, after all, the true culprits are abroad, safely insulated from partisan political fallout.

 

This is not about accountability, because it seems clear at this point that no one will be held accountable. What these revelations do demand, though, is a full accounting, so that we can prevent a similar outbreak from happening in the future. Particularly given China’s increasing risk tolerance, expansionist ambitions, growing technological acumen, and utter disregard for best practices and fail-safes, American voters deserve to know just how the Covid pandemic happened, and they deserve elected representatives who are properly prepared to prevent the next global disaster.

 

They won’t get any of that, of course, in no small part because the politics of the moment are not conducive to good governance. The purgatorial pandemic years may be behind us, but the factors that caused them are still with us, still making the next nightmare inevitable. And no one seems inclined to do much of anything about it. After all, if no one is “owned,” or “destroyed,” who cares?