Western attempts to blame China for COVID-19 a geopolitical conspiracy, says Kazakh research center

NUR-SULTAN, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The hypothesis hyped up by Western countries that the novel coronavirus was deliberately leaked by a Chinese lab is a geopolitical conspiracy, according to the China Studies Center in Kazakhstan.

The U.S. zeal trying to pin the blame of the pandemic on China is a result of rising economic competition between the two countries, said a report by the center.

Earlier this year, a World Health Organization (WHO) report suggested it was most likely that the virus spread to humans from bats through an unspecified intermediary animal.

However, the United States criticized the report as incomplete and lacking crucial data, and a U.S. intelligence report recently finished but not yet released to the public reportedly found "a lab leak in Wuhan plausible."

The report by the Kazakh leading research institute on China questioned these Western theories, saying this is a purposeful work for their domestic audience and an attempt to divert their citizens' attention from the governments' failure in containing the COVID-19 epidemic and the inefficiency of their political systems.

"If the Chinese government really were so 'insidious' and would release an artificially grown virus from the laboratory, then why would it be done on their territory ... with its 1.4 billion people and a high population density, which is a very favorable environment for the spread of any virus in principle?" said the report.

Such Western hypotheses do not hold water, because considering China's years of efforts to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and so much effort put in human capital, it would be "a suicide to imagine some kind of laboratory games with a dangerous little-studied virus, and also unpredictable threat to national security," according to the report.

At the end, the report noted that the country where an epidemic originated does not have to make compensation.

"If we recall the global epidemics and deadly diseases of the past, no one in history has paid any compensation. Various epidemics of plague, smallpox, cholera, Spanish flu - were they less deadly? Or if you recall the country from which AIDS began to spread in 1981, to whom and what did it pay for the 25 million deaths?" concluded the report.