China Compares Wuhan Lab Probe with WMDs in Iraq

China’s state-run Global Times on Saturday compared demands for a more thorough investigation of the “lab leak hypothesis” – the theory that the Chinese coronavirus escaped from a Chinese virology lab in Wuhan – with the hunt for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq.

In other words, the Chinese paper claimed Western intelligence services are using disinformation to whip their populations into war fever against China.

The Global Times editorial ran into thousands of words, laboriously dredging up every bit of the Iraqi WMD saga that seemed like it might be useful for dismissing the lab leak “conspiracy theory” as a comparable perversion of Western intelligence agencies. The Chinese paper even put together a characteristically ugly “infographic” comparing the two sagas.

The bottom line from the Chinese paper was an entirely false implication that the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) ruled out lab leak – or at least a leak from Wuhan labs, since the Chinese government has its own bizarre conspiracy theory that the disease was created in an American laboratory and expects W.H.O. to take it seriously. 

“Apparently, these are not the results the US government had expected. In frustration, the Biden administration gave an emergency assignment to the US intelligence community, in an attempt to overturn the W.H.O. report,” the Global Times wrote.

“But we must wonder, how can a group of CIA agents specialized in assassinations and espionage understand coronavirus better than the leading scientists do?” it added.

The Global Times suggested the U.S. government is trying to sell its people on a conspiratorial fantasy that “conforms to classic Hollywood narratives in movies like Resident Evil and 28 Days Later, which greatly appeal to the Western audience.”

After a great deal of raving about “whole industry chain” disinformation and “washing powder” – the derogatory term Russian President Vladimir Putin coined to dismiss evidence of WMD in Iraq – the Global Times repeated China’s demand for its own conspiracy theory about the coronavirus originating at a U.S. Army at a lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland, to be taken as seriously as the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis. China has presented no credible evidence of coronavirus cases in Maryland prior to the ones in China, or of any connection between Fort Detrick and the coronavirus outbreak in any way.

The newspaper concluded the U.S. government is only talking about the lab leak to distract from its own failure to control the pandemic, a failure the Global Times implied the United States should be “held accountable” for by some higher world authority.

The Global Times stressed that regime change in the style of Saddam Hussein’s downfall is not a possibility with China, and even in his case, things did not work out as Western powers hoped they would.