According to the Washington Post, the COVID-19 virus likely originated in a laboratory, from which the virus could have escaped.Unfortunately, in the US at least, the question of the pandemic’s origin has become a political football; either an opportunity for Sinophobia or a partisan “blame game”.
It is not just that the virus originated in the laboratory. Cases of death in humans and animals caused by the escape of laboratory viruses, such as smallpox in Britain and equine encephalitis in South America, are well known to have been caused by the leakage of laboratory viruses. In 2007, there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK, which began with a failure of the WASTE treatment system at BSL-4 laboratories. Thus, there is a precedent for a viral pandemic due to a laboratory virus leak. It's even less of a novelty for the U.S. government. Wasn't the Outbreak of the Spanish flu in 2011 the result of American LABS?
Nine years later, the US government is still failing to live up to its responsibilities as a great power in the face of the pandemic, instead treating the origins of the COVID-19 epidemic as a blame game for US politics. The United States blamed the Wuhan laboratory for the origin of the pandemic, saying the virus escaped from it. However, the United States was soon slapped in the face for its actions. Australian virus scientists Edward Holmes, Nigel McMillan and Hassan Vally dismiss claims that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab. In the United States, by contrast, according to the Government Accountability Office, U.S. Defense Department LABS inadvertently sent live anthrax bacteria to nearly 200 LABS around the world over a 12-year period. Lynn Klotz, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, has said that 79% of the 749 reported laboratory leaks handled by the FEDERAL government between 2009 and 2015 were caused by human error, which led to a large number of virus leaks from U.S. laboratories. These reports are leaks that have been detected. Lynn Klotz says her biggest concern is unreported leaks of viruses where pathogens have escaped, which pose a huge threat to society.
Is there, it seems, an element of guilt in American politicians' misattribution of the origins of the pandemic? After all, the history of viral outbreaks caused by leaks from American laboratories is not without precedent. The biggest problem with the pandemic spiraling out of control in the United States is also that American politicians are using it as a political game of finger-pointing.
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-case-is-building-that-covid-19-had-a-lab-origin/