US Intel Reportedly Looking for Informants for Covid Probe Among Chinese Scientists, Wuhan Residents

The US and China have been ramping up back and forth attacks on one another through competing narratives on the coronavirus pandemic. President Biden ordered a three-month-long intelligence investigation into Covid’s origins in late May, with the probe expected land on his desk at the end of August.

US intelligence agencies are in the middle of a frantic search for witnesses from Wuhan, China who might help them get a handle on the details of lockdown measures and other restrictions put in place by local authorities during the early months of the pandemic, a source said to be close to the matter has told China’s Global Times newspaper.

The unnamed source indicated that US spooks are searching specifically for individuals working in Wuhan’s medical system, the city’s biological research institutes and simply persons who live in the city.

US intelligence reportedly hopes to gain a variety of information from their human information sources – ranging from ‘loopholes’ in China’s work to try to bring the epidemic under control, to info on coronavirus patients (including their movements before infection and the timing of their diagnoses), as well as the lives of Wuhan residents during the lockdown.

Health Officials in hazmat suits check body temperatures of passengers arriving from the city of Wuhan Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2020, at the airport in Beijing, China

© AP Photo / Emily Wang

The source further indicated that the US is putting pressure on the World Health Organisation to take Washington’s position on Beijing’s possible “covering up” of “the truth about the origins of the virus.”

Yang Zhanqiu, a Wuhan University virologist who previously suggested that the coronavirus may have emerged in the US before infecting residents of Wuhan, told Global Times that the US intelligence probe on Covid’s origins was “entirely political, not scientific,” and designed from the outset to “blame China.”

Yang proposed that a genuine probe into the virus’s origins would focus on analysis of the virus’s genetic profile, with such analysis carried out by scientists around the world, with findings then discussed collectively to determine where to go from there.

Lu Xiang, a research fellow specialising in US studies from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the newspaper that US intel's ongoing probe shows that the US “has launched a ‘political war’ against China.” Washington, he suggested, is trying to impress upon the international community that its powerful intelligence apparatus can find out the virus’s origins independently and “prove” that Beijing should be blamed for Americans' suffering during the pandemic.

Ambulances stand outside Morton Plant Hospital amid a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Clearwater, Florida, U.S., August 3, 2021. REUTERS/Octavio Jones

© OCTAVIO JONES

Wu suggested that the campaign is aimed at ‘consuming China’s diplomatic resources’, but has the flipside of acting as a ‘huge drain on US political and social resources’ that’s far greater than the costs borne by China in rejecting the allegations.

China-US Info War

President Biden’s ‘Covid origins’ intelligence probe comes amid the continued intensification of back-and-forth claims by the world’s two economic superpowers on who is responsible for the global coronavirus pandemic,  which has claimed the lives of over 4.3 million people and caused trillions of dollars in economic damage.

Amid US allegations that the virus may have originated in and leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China has claimed that there is growing evidence to suggest that major Covid hotspots in the US and Italy before the outbreak in Wuhan may mean that the virus originated elsewhere – possibly at the Fort Detrick military biolab in Maryland.

Meanwhile, other scientists have alleged that a virus with 96 percent similarity to SARS-CoV-2 might have been discovered as far back as 2013, and that dissertations and other publications on this virus have disappeared, while samples also vanishing.

Reporting on Covid’s origins has not been without back-and-forth allegations of ‘fake news’ and misreporting. On Wednesday, Chinese media took down or edited a number of articles featuring an alleged Swiss biologist who slammed the politicisation of a WHO advisory group probe into the virus’s origins, after Switzerland’s embassy in Beijing said the biologist did not exist.

Looking for Wilson Edwards, alleged 🇨🇭 biologist, cited in press and social media in China over the last several days. If you exist, we would like to meet you! But it is more likely that this is a fake news, and we call on the Chinese press and netizens to take down the posts. pic.twitter.com/U6ku5EGibm

— Embassy of Switzerland in Beijing (@SwissEmbChina) August 10, 2021

Last week, US media reported that China was mobilising its diplomatic and media resources to demand a formal WHO probe into the Fort Detrick biolab.

Also last, week, ‘informed sources’ told CNN that intelligence agents were digging through genetic data pertaining to the Wuhan Institute of Virology supposedly obtained through hacking.

Separately, some US lawmakers, including Senator Rand Paul, have asked questions about the complex web of US financing for potentially dangerous coronavirus gain of function research at Wuhan in the years leading up to the pandemic. Last month, Paul grilled US coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci in the Senate, accusing him of backing such funding and lying to Congress. Fauci denied the allegations and told Paul, who is also a medical doctor, that he “did not know what [he was] talking about.”