US President Donald Trump speaks as he departs the White House, on May 5, 2020, in Washington, DC en route to Arizona, where he will tour a mask factory and hold a roundtable on Native American issues.

By Dennis Etler

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is a world-class research institute and collaborates with scientists from throughout the world, from the US, from Europe and Australia and elsewhere and has a sterling reputation, so the charges being directed against it by the likes of Pompeo and Trump are really slanderous and without any foundation whatsoever.

You really can’t believe a word that they have to say. They even contradict themselves almost immediately. I don’t know if you saw the interview on This Week with Pompeo over the weekend. He was asked point-blank, do you believe that the virus was created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology Lab and he said, well according to very, very reliable sources, yes I definitely do, and then the interviewer came back and said, well look your own intelligence services said that there’s no such evidence and that the scientific community is united in saying that it naturally occurred and that it was not bioengineered or created in the lab and there’s no evidence that it escaped from the Wuhan Lab, and then Pompeo immediately agreed and said, yes I agree with that assessment.

So, within fifteen seconds he went from saying it was bioengineered in the Wuhan lab to saying it wasn’t.

So, I mean they just spin these tales, they fabricate them out of whole cloth, there’s no credibility whatsoever in their accusations and of course, Pompeo has one of these famous quotes now that will go down in history when he was head of the CIA, they lied, they cheated, and they stole.

Well yeah, that should be the motto rather than In God We Trust. I think the motto for the US at this point is We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal, and that’s been demonstrated by their attacks against China, against Iran, and against whoever they want to target for regime change or to bring down when they have a challenge be it political, economic, or military, the only recourse they have is to spread disinformation, lies and slanders, and it’s becoming so transparent that I don’t see how anybody can really believe a word of what they have to say.

Even Dr. Fauci who is the head of the coronavirus task force has said that there is absolutely no evidence or reason to believe that the coronavirus was engineered and certainly not at the Wuhan laboratory and he went on to say that there’s no reason to believe that it escaped, that it had been collected, curated and somehow escaped into the population. Even his own scientific advisors and medical experts have discredited the whole idea and it’s not accepted by anyone within the scientific and medical communities, so we need to put that whole story to rest. It’s a total fabrication with no basis in fact.

And in point of fact, there is more and more evidence from around the world that the coronavirus, Sars-CoV-2, as it’s known scientifically, that causes COVID-19, was probably circulating worldwide much earlier than when it was first identified in Wuhan. There’s evidence now that it was circulating in France in December and of course, it could be much earlier than that. In Italy, medical doctors in northern Italy have suggested that they saw patients with very similar diagnoses in October and November. So, I think there’s a growing consensus that this virus was widely circulated globally and we really don’t know what the time depth is.

It just so happens that, for whatever reason, there was a concentration, sort of an explosion of the virus in Wuhan at the fish market, which was not the source of the virus, but where it just happened to become widespread, it just caught fire there, it was identified. That was the first place it was identified, not necessarily its source of origin. Its source of origin could be anywhere in the world at this point we really have no idea.

There is even evidence that it might have been circulating in the US in the Summer of 2019. There’s a lot of influenza-like illnesses that occurred then that have not been identified. They need to be forensically investigated to see if they very well may be COVID-19. There’s that whole vaping disease and it’s been documented that vaping predisposes young people to severe cases of COVID-19. Most young adults get an asymptomatic or mild case but if you are vaping that’s a major risk factor for escalating the disease into something much more serious.

So, maybe those vaping incidences which have been a mystery were an example of that. We don’t know. We need to test for that. There were also these pockets of influenza or COVID-19-like illnesses in Maryland around the same time that there was an incident at the Fort Detrick bioweapons lab when there was a contamination event and it was closed down at the end of July 2019 and soon thereafter there was an upsurge in deaths in the nursing homes in the vicinity. And antibody tests show that the virus is far more widespread in the population than expected, indicating that it might have been circulating much earlier than previously thought.

So the word is still out as to the ultimate source of origin of the virus, how long it has been circulating, whether it’s mutated from being less to more contagious or less to more lethal. This has to be studied epidemiologically, it shouldn’t be a political inquisition, politics has nothing to do with it. It’s a scientific question and it should be approached in that fashion, but of course, the US has politicized the whole thing because they have ulterior motives.

They want to stigmatize China, that’s part of their game plan and of course, the situation in the U S is dire, the economy is in a depression, there is no other word for it, and it’s not about to come out of it anytime soon. The whole response by the Trump administration has been a dismal failure, a debacle, and rather than now own up to their own failure they have to search for a scapegoat and of course, China is a very likely target for that, so I think that pretty much answers most of those questions.

As regards to the vaccine, China is working very hard on it and they have pledged that once they come up with something that is safe and reliable they will make it available free to the world whereas of course, big pharma in the US is looking for a vaccine or some sort of therapy as a new cash cow.

Gilead which is behind this new anti-viral drug that I can’t even pronounce, that’s gotten a lot of play of late, is expected to make billions of dollars marketing it at four thousand bucks a shot for the individual therapy whereas China was basically involved in the original research and they actually put a patent on it for use as a therapy in China in opposition to Gilead because they will want to try to milk it for all it’s worth, while China just wants to use it to serve the people and to help relieve their suffering, so again it’s the difference between China which is really trying to help.

I mean, look at what they’ve done worldwide, sending out medical teams and PPE, equipment around the world, particularly to developing countries that are in dire need and they get savaged for doing that and their motives are impugned and for the West to do that is pretty disgusting as far as I’m concerned.

Dennis Etler is an American political analyst who has a decades-long interest in international affairs. He’s a former professor of Anthropology at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California. He recorded this article for Press TV website.