06.02.2025
_(52665469105)_art_full.jpg)
Weaponising Covid
CIA claims that Covid-19 emerged from a Chinese government-run lab have nothing to do with public health and everything to do with an attack on the poorest in the world, maintains Ian Spencer
The Central Intelligence Agency’s intervention on Covid came just days after the appointment of John Ratcliffe, Trump’s nominee as its director. In an interview with Breitbart News, Ratcliffe said that “intelligence and common sense” leads us to conclude that “the origin of Covid was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology” and he would ensure that “the public is aware that the agency is going to get off the sidelines”. And there was me thinking that the CIA was going to cling to science, objectivity and service to global humanity, in a way that it never has before.
There is very little evidence that the Covid‑19 virus had its origins in a Wuhan lab. But, as with Trump himself, his administration is never one to let the truth get in the way of a good story. However, it is not accidental that the comments came just days after Trump ditched all cooperation with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and suspended US support for aid projects around the world.
Ratcliffe’s assertion was not based on any new evidence and gets only lukewarm support even from the CIA, which stated that it has “low confidence that a research-related origin of the Covid‑19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting”.1 This assessment was a reflection of the widely held view that the origins of the virus was likely to have been in the live animal markets of Wuhan city.2
Zoonotic
The origin of zoonotic transmission from animal to human is often in the countryside, but magnified in the cities. The most likely reservoir for the virus is in bats, but also, possibly, civet cats and bamboo rats. It is far more likely that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was an innocent bystander to the unfolding catastrophe than its origin.
Formally, withdrawing from WHO requires the authority of Congress and a one-year notice period. However, Trump’s love of the diktat has found its expression in a flurry of executive orders on a wide range of topics. It seems particularly vindictive in the way that it has been applied to WHO and the ‘pausing’ of funding to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Trump’s executive orders on January 20 instructed the US Centre for Disease Control to cease all contact and cooperation with WHO and took place with immediate effect. Not that this is the first time Trump has attacked WHO. In July 2020, during his first term of office, at the height of the pandemic, he issued a similar order, but this was reversed by the incoming Biden administration.
The origins of lethal pandemic diseases have a long and highly political history. The great flu pandemic of 1918-20 that killed between 17 and 50 million people worldwide probably had its origins in the transmission of H1N1 influenza in Kansas, where the first recorded cases were. This was amplified and transmitted around the world by the concentration of thousands of US soldiers in the appalling conditions of World War I.
The HIV/Aids pandemic had its roots in the transition of the Simian immunodeficiency virus to humans - probably from the bush-meat trade, but amplified by imperialism, the international trade in blood products harvested from the poor, war and societal collapse.
Nor is it unknown for viruses to escape from laboratories. In 1978 the deadly smallpox virus, which was being studied at the University of Birmingham Medical school, infected a worker there. She subsequently became the last recorded person to die of a disease which WHO had played such a major part in eradicating worldwide.
It would, of course, be odd if the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not studying coronaviruses. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), caused by the virus SARS-CoV-1, was the first identified strain of the SARS-related coronavirus and was identified in 2002 in Guangdong, China. It infected over 8,000 people from over 30 countries and resulted in at least 774 deaths worldwide. WHO, informed of the disease in February 2003, issued a global alert the following March, which played a part in limiting its lethal impact.
In the UK, as we have seen from the protracted machinations of the Covid‑19 enquiry, the next lethal pandemic was expected to be influenza. The Chinese experience of SARS meant their focus was already, quite rightly, on coronaviruses. The failure to access data from China contributed to a delayed response to the pandemic in the UK and beyond. While it is not impossible that a lab worker in Wuhan could have been infected, it seems highly unlikely that this would have been the cause of the pandemic, according to respectable academic sources.3
None of this has stopped people like Republican senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, expressing what really might be at stake here. He said on January 25 that he was “pleased the CIA concluded in the final days of the Biden administration that the lab-leak theory is the most plausible explanation” and he commended Ratcliffe for declassifying the assessment. “Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Cotton said in a statement.4
And, yes, China and many other countries will pay, thanks to a form of economic war, fought with US-imposed tariffs, that will have an immediate impact on the living standards of workers worldwide, including in the USA.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that WHO is being targeted because it has resolutely refused to alter the conclusions of scientific research to fit the foreign policy objectives of the world hegemon. After all, it concluded in March 2021 that the laboratory origin of the Covid virus was the “least likely hypothesis”.5
Ironically, of the 194 WHO member-states, the US is the largest contributor, averaging around 20% of funding of the organisation’s annual budget of $3 billion, while China is the next biggest contributor.
The immediate effect on WHO is likely to lead to a reduction of work, the loss of jobs and a reduced ability to carry out the vital task of global public health monitoring.6 Effectively, Trump may have sown the seeds of the next pandemic, as it would be excluded from the global monitoring of emerging diseases or dependent purely on voluntary cooperation from friendly countries.
Hindering the work of WHO and USAID is likely to have dire consequences for the poorest of the world. While foreign aid only represents about 1% of the federal budget, by the evening of January 24, secretary of state Marco Rubio had issued a directive, effectively freezing operations of the government’s lead provider of non-military aid. Rubio went on to declare himself as USAID’s acting director, possibly signalling its future absorption into the state department.
US funding accounted for 42% of all humanitarian aid tracked by the UN last year. In 2023, the US issued an estimated $68 billion in foreign assistance, and over 60% flowed through USAID - which, like WHO, was established by Congress and in principle can only be closed by it. But in the meantime it is vulnerable to the immediate freeze on funding.7
Elon Musk
Meanwhile, Elon Musk has been given his own Department of Government Efficiency, with a brief for making efficiency savings in the US administration. His unsupported assessment of USAID is that it is a “criminal organisation”. He later posted on X: “Did you know that USAID, using your tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including Covid‑19, that killed millions of people?” Musk was quickly supported by Trump, who described USAID as being “run by a bunch of radical lunatics”.8
No new projects are to be started, no contracts are to be extended and work is to be stopped on existing programmes. By January 27 at least 56 of USAID’s leaders had been sent home on ‘administrative leave’. It has over 10,000 employees and thousands more dependent on it worldwide. It will also affect NGOs, religious organisations and businesses that it has contracts with to supply services.
Arguably, the ‘pause’ in funding for USAID has succeeded in one important objective: it has produced uncertainty in a wide range of different agencies in a range of countries. However, this may have the unintended consequence of allowing China to fill the gaps in provision. As Democratic senator Chris Coons told the Senate on January 30, “Our biggest global competitor and adversary is delighted that we’ve handed them an opportunity today to say to communities and countries around the world that we are not a reliable partner. The administration may be claiming that this pause is temporary, but its effects will not be.”9
USAID is a product of the cold war. It was founded in 1961 by president John F Kennedy to counter Soviet influence. While China may aspire to be a world power and has significant influence as a manufacturer and investor, it does not have the ideological influence of the USSR.
While the threat of tariffs is real, especially against China, it is noticeable that some have been withdrawn after forcing whatever concessions have been demanded against Canada and Mexico. Will the world hegemon so lightly discard USAID as one of the most important means of its exertion of soft power in the world?
There is no doubt that neither Trump nor Musk could give a damn about increased deaths among the poorest of the world. But they may think twice about leaving the soft-power field open to China. Waivers for a few programmes concerned with the immediate preservation of life were quick to follow the initial attack on USAID.
While no serious expert in public health thinks that Covid‑19 is the consequence of a sinister Chinese government plot to unleash mayhem on the capitalist world (of which, after all, it is a part), all this will serve as a clumsy casus belli in the economic war to come with China.
Nor is anyone convinced by the ridiculous pretext of China’s role in the export of fentanyl precursors, although one is entitled to ask why the USA has one of the highest rates of illicit narcotics use in the world. After all, there is a well-known relationship between social inequality and recreational drug use.10
In the meantime, legal challenges to the freezing of federal government funding will follow as night follows day. But no matter - for the poorest migrant labourers in the USA, for the starving of the world dependent on USAID and for US civil servants, the objective has been achieved: fear.
-
www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/26/cia-now-backs-lab-leak-theory-to-explain-origins-of-covid-19.↩︎
-
www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-remarks-at-the-member-state-briefing-on-the-report-of-the-international-team-studying-the-origins-of-sars-cov-2.↩︎
-
publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-consequences-of-the-us-withdrawal-from-the-who.↩︎
-
www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/3/us-secretary-of-state-rubio-says-he-has-become-acting-director-of-usaid.↩︎
-
www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250202-musk-brands-usaid-criminal-as-civil-service-scrutiny-grows.↩︎
-
K Pickett and G Wilkinson The inner level: how more equal societies reduce stress, restore sanity and improve everyone’s wellbeing London 2019.↩︎