In January 2021, the World Health Organization sent a delegation of scientists to China to conduct a field study in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province. A month later, the leader of the team, Peter Ben Embarek, presented a report that stated that it was "extremely unlikely" that the novel coronavirus had leaked from the virology lab in Wuhan, a conspiracy theory that then US president Donald Trump had pressured the WHO scientists to investigate.

The politicization of the scientific efforts to trace the origins of the outbreak has taken place since the public health threat was first identified, with the issue being given center stage in the middle of the series of sanctions adopted by the Trump administration against China. Since then, there has been much fake news spread around the world seeking to embarrass and smear China.

This is hugely detrimental to the coordination of the global fight against the pandemic, as a lot of time is wasted on the narratives. With this, international cooperation on the distribution of the vaccines to developing countries is failing. Studies published last year show that the virus was already circulating worldwide in 2019, before the first COVID-19 cases were identified in Wuhan, such as in the sewers of Barcelona, Spain, in March, in Florianopolis, Brazil, in November, or even in Turin, in Italy, in December of the same year.

One of the hypotheses is the virus may have escaped from the US virology lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Its activities were suspended in July 2019 due to the leakage of biological waste through the sewage system. According to the New York Times on Aug 4, "safety concerns at a prominent military germ lab have led to the government to shut down research involving dangerous microbes like the Ebola virus". "Research is currently on hold," the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick said in a statement. "The shutdown is likely to last months," Caree Vander Linden, the spokeswoman, said in an interview, "because the center did not have 'sufficient systems in place to decontaminate wastewater' from its highest-security labs."

But the US accusations against China continued and on May 26 this year, US President Joe Biden ordered intelligence services to investigate the origins of the virus. Again, he proposed that the pandemic was caused by the negligence of the Chinese government, calling into question the role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In a statement issued by the White House, Biden said: "Shortly after I became president, in March, I had my National Security Advisor task of the Intelligence Community to prepare a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of the COVID-19, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident … I have now asked the Intelligence Community to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion and report back to me in 90 days."

It is interesting to note that, in the face of renewed pressure from the United States, WHO expert Peter Ben Embarek changed his stance by stating on Aug 12, on Danish public channel TV2, that "an employee of the lab gets infected while working in a bat cave collecting samples. While being a lab leak, such a scenario would also fit our first hypothesis of direct transmission of the virus from bat to human. This is the hypothesis that we consider to be likely".

The problem of the narratives against China being relentlessly explored by Western media and governments, takes us back to the story of The Wolf and the Lamb, the well-known fable of Aesop. In this fable, the wolf approaches the lamb and, to justify having to kill and eat it, the wolf accuses the lamb of various offenses, all of which the lamb shows to be impossible. Losing patience with the lamb's argument, the wolf says that the crimes must have been committed by someone else in the family and that he doesn't propose to delay his meal with more questions. The moral outlined is that the tyrant can always find an excuse for his tyranny and that the iniquitous will never listen to the reasoning of the innocent. In the West, regardless of what the Beijing authorities say or prove, China is already guilty in the court of public opinion.

However, this is nothing new in the field of international relations. It is worth remembering that in 2003 the US and the United Kingdom invaded Iraq under the argument that Saddam Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction, something that later turned out to be a huge lie. If the intent of the US was to stop the Iraqi regime having such weapons, it could have asked the UN to conduct an independent investigation to prove it had them. It did not do this and acted outside international norms and the UN Security Council.

To that goal, the governments of Washington and London acted together to remove Brazilian diplomat José Maurício Bustani, who was director-general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. In 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, Bustani wanted to send a delegation to inspect Saddam Hussein's arsenal and verify, on the spot, the US claims. In the face of it, he was harshly attacked by the US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John R. Bolton, who demanded his resignation. For him, Bustani was deemed to be an obstacle in creating the case for the invasion of Iraq. At the time, he got a "menacing" phone call from Bolton, and was removed by a vote of just one-third of member nations at an unusual special session of the OPCW, at which the US cited alleged mismanagement in calling for his dismissal. With Bustani out of the OPCW, the US and the UK could act freely. As is well known, the chemical weapons they alleged to justify their invasion were never found.

As we can see, rational arguments, generally when they clash with the narratives of powerful countries, are overshadowed by lies. The conclusions of the investigations led by Western countries have only one outcome, which corroborates with the theses previously defended by them. If not, they can mention that "it's basically impossible to have a proper investigation if one of the main parties doesn't want to cooperate," said Thomas Wright, Brookings Institution senior fellow, to Reuters, on Aug 25, which is what they are saying about the US investigators' failure to prove the virus leaked from the lab in Wuhan. In this regard, it is worth mentioning again the moral of Aesop's fable: the tyrant can always find an excuse for his tyranny and that the iniquitous will never listen to the reasoning of the innocent. However, unlike other times, the Western powers can no longer impose their own narratives because now they collide against a great wall where the truth asserts itself.

The author is a professor of international political economy at Sao Paulo State University (UNESP).

The author contributed this article to China Watch exclusively. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.

All rights reserved. Copying or sharing of any content for other than personal use is prohibited without prior written permission.