By: Jimmy K. Laking 

Donald Trump in April 2020 called it the “Chinese Virus.”

Trump said people were looking at the laboratory-origin theory “very, very strongly.” Then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added “these are not the first times that we have the world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab.”

India’s media establishments from Day 1 referred to the Covid-19 pandemic disease as the Wuhan virus.

Now Joe Biden, Trump’s successor, is out to ferret out the truth. On May 26, 2021, the US President announced that he had tasked the country’s “intelligence community to redouble their efforts to collect and to analyze information that would bring us closest to a definitive conclusion” on whether the virus that causes Covid-19 originated from human contact with an infected animal, or from a “laboratory accident”.

The intelligence community has been given 90 days to submit a report.

In answer to Trump, China accused the United States of creating the virus in a bio-warfare laboratory in Maryland and that the US used its delegation to the World Military Games in Wuhan on October 2019 to unleash the disease in China.

The US countered by accusing China of concocting the virus in its Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) “only to leak it to the Wuhan wet market through the sale of laboratory test animals.”

The WHO maintained it was purely of zoonotic origin meaning it exists normally in animals but that it can infect humans.

Writing for the Scientist, Emily Makowski wrote that while the pathogen appears to have come from wild animals, there is no evidence it came from a laboratory.

Writing for the Indian Express, resident editor Nirupama Subramanian bared the theory that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a Wuhan lab is now taken more seriously with India weighing in.

Subramanian added that the US and India are now seriously pursuing the Wuhan lab leak theory based on a fact sheet made public by the US State Department that revealed previously undisclosed information.

Three things stood out, added Subramanian.

That Wuhan researchers had fallen ill with Covid-19 like symptoms long before the first reported case in Dec. 8, 2019.

That in 2016, WIV researchers conducted a bat coronavirus that matched Covid-19 by 96.2 per cent.

That the WIV conducted animal experiments on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army.

No country, except China, has opposed Biden’s move.

What now after the US probe?  Subramanian’s article did not say. Meanwhile, with the US determined to find the smoking gun, it strikes us that the rest of the world (the Philippines including) is tossed aside in the role of spectators as the chess game continues.

The bleeding continues as the mystery deepens.