This article originally appeared on the New York Post on August 25, 2021
Four months after taking office, President Biden suddenly directed US intelligence agencies to probe the origins of the coronavirus that — as everyone knows by now — came from China. Interesting timing this, perhaps prompted by the fact that he had just been caught canceling the previous president’s investigation into the matter.
“Senior administration officials” are now leaking to sympathetic media outlets that the final report of the intelligence community has been sent to Biden but that it is, sadly, “inconclusive.”
Don’t expect to be able to read the report for yourself anytime soon, because it is “classified.”
You must simply take the word of unnamed officials that we just don’t know and we may never know whether the novel coronavirus jumped from an animal to a human naturally, or might have accidentally escaped from a lab in China.
But they are eager — perhaps too eager — to attack the idea that it could have been a bioweapon in development. They say it has several naturally occurring features that are found in other coronaviruses.
Well, of course, it does. That’s because it was genetically engineered using the “backbone” of an existing coronavirus.
But it also has novel insertions — like dropping a bigger engine into an existing chassis — as I wrote earlier in these pages:
“Those doing the splicing left ‘signatures’ behind in the genome itself. To boost a virus’ lethality, for example, those doing gain-of-function research customarily insert a snippet of RNA that codes for two arginine amino acids. This snippet — called double CGG — has never been found in any other coronaviruses, but is present in CoV-2. Besides this damning evidence, there are other indications of tampering as well.”
But no, a rushed investigation found this was all “inconclusive.” Our intelligence analysts are utterly bamboozled about the origins of the disease that has killed more than 600,000 Americans.
They are absolutely certain that China did nothing nefarious. At worst, it was an “accident.”
The meta-message from this mysterious report: Don’t blame China. Don’t demand reparations. Don’t decouple our economies. Don’t upset the geopolitical order in which China marches relentlessly on, despite unleashing a devastating virus on the world.
Our intelligence agencies — or at least the people who now run them — think that the people of the United States are utterly stupid.
Steven W. Mosher has a forthcoming book entitled “Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics” (Regnery Press).
