Commentary: Shifting blame cannot hide U.S. "Waterloo" in fighting pandemic

BEIJING, Aug. 13 (Xinhua) -- Since its outset, the investigation led by the U.S. intelligence community into COVID-19 origins has raised widespread concern about the politicization of this scientific issue, and has thus been opposed by scientists around the world.

With the latest media revelations that the White House has considered launching another probe if the current one "proves inconclusive," the U.S. motive is laid bare that Washington has a clear end-goal of stoking up the lab-leak hypothesis to divert attention from its pandemic response failures and shifting blame to China.

According to CNN, as the 90-day probe is near its end, U.S. spies have failed to associate the deadly pathogen with the Wuhan virology institute "after three months of poring over data and raw intelligence."

U.S. spies' botched attempt came as no surprise. In fact, the groundless "lab-leak theory" was widely ridiculed for a whole year and only gained steam this year after Michael Gordon, who wrote either misleading or downright inaccurate articles about the fabricated Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the 2003 invasion, hinted a far-fetched connection between the "sick staff" of the Wuhan lab and the COVID-19 outbreak by quoting a so-called "previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report."

Even Anthony Fauci, White House chief medical advisor, has openly questioned "strength" and "confidence" in the U.S. intelligence of connecting the origin of COVID-19 with sick lab staff in Wuhan in his interview with The New York Times.

For long, the U.S. rationale for pursuing the "lab-leak theory" is that the evidence for both the natural origin and the "lab-leak" theory is weak.

However, as has been argued by many scientists, including David Robertson, head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, such an argument has set up a "false equivalence" between them, because a lot of evidence now points to a natural spillover event.

For the ruling elites' in Washington, scapegoating China has for long been an expedient ploy to deflect the blame from their disastrous response to the pandemic. And yet this political manoeuver hoodwinks no one.