Pentagon taking a 'hard look' at theory that COVID-19 is a Chinese bioweapon just days after top brass rubbishes it
Ever since the coronavirus pandemic emerged to affect nearly two million people globally, the world has turned more suspicious towards China. Several speculations are doing the rounds over the virus' origin in the Asian nation — in one of its wet markets in Wuhan or a biolab. On Tuesday, April 14, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said the US intelligence community has taken a hard look into the claim that the virus started in a Chinese lab.
"There's a lot of rumor and speculation in a wide variety of media, blog sites, etc," Milley told reporters when asked if he possessed any evidence that the virus might have escaped a Chinese laboratory by accident. "It should be no surprise to you that we have taken a keen interest in that, and we have had a lot of intelligence take a hard look at that," he said, adding, "At this point it’s inconclusive, although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural, but we do not know for sure."
It has been widely reported that the COVID-19 virus first started from Wuhan and it was a wet market from which it started through animal-human contact. The majority in the scientists’ community believe that the virus probably jumped from an animal to a human and dismissed the speculation that it is a bioweapon that escaped, citing lack of evidence.
Republican representative Tom Cotton says virus is a bioweapon
On April 14, Washington Post reported that in January 2018, US officials had warned about safety concerns at a lab in Wuhan that was studying the virus from bats. The fact that Wuhan has two research labs for infectious diseases gave boost to the bioweapon theory in the early days of the disease's outbreak. Hardliner Republican leaders like Tom Cotton have stuck to the bioweapon theory and suggested the US should look into the possibility that the disease might have originated in a lab.
"We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that," Cotton told Fox News in February. "We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases."
Joint Staff Surgeon Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs has also rubbished the theory unequivocally, saying “no” to it earlier this month. On April 6, he told reporters: "If I could just be clear, there is nothing to that."
"That is not something that I'm worried about. I think, you know, right now what we're concerned about is how do we treat people who are sick, how do we prevent people from getting sick. But no, I am not worried about this as a bioweapon," he added.
Several conspiracy theories have exploded across the digital space and social media over the COVID-19 pandemic that has claimed over 126,000 lives globally. The US has remained the most affected with over 600,000 hit and almost 26,000 dead.