Commentary: COVID lab-leak hypothesis politically motivated rather than science-based

BEIJING, March 30 (Xinhua) -- Lab-leak hypothesis of coronavirus is the latest episode of the political games that have again been revived by certain U.S. politicians to attack China under the guise of tracing the origins of COVID-19.

The scientific community and scientific evidence related to the matter, which should have been at the center of focus, have been absent or neglected in this repeated farce.

The U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing on the origins of COVID-19 on March 8, following a classified intelligence report by the U.S. Department of Energy suggesting that the virus probably came from a lab leak, despite the fact that the department made its updated judgement with "low confidence."

"The hearing itself, however, offered a heavy dose of political theatre, giving a preview of sessions to follow in the weeks and months to come," the scientific journal Nature reported.

According to the report, three out of four witnesses at the hearing supported the lab-leak hypothesis, but their credibility is doubted by the scientific community.

"Not one of those witnesses had any scientific record of investigating and publishing peer-reviewed research on the origins of this virus in quality journals," said Michael Worobey, a biologist at the University of Arizona who has studied genetic evidence since the early days of the pandemic.

Science, another major academic publisher, reported on the hearing under the headline "Science takes back seat to politics in first House hearing on origin of COVID-19 pandemic."

It is obvious that political motivation has played a decisive role in the lab-leak theory, which has been hyped up by an intelligence report made with "low confidence," despite scientific evidence pointing in the opposite direction.

"Low confidence" means the information obtained "is not enough or is too fragmented to make a definitive analytic judgement or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion," according to a CNN report.

A science-based report published by an expert panel in Science magazine in October 2022 overwhelmingly supported zoonotic hypotheses and concluded that the COVID-19 virus likely spread naturally in a zoonotic jump from an animal to humans, without help from a lab.

Fabian Leendertz, a zoonotic disease expert, said that a laboratory leak as the possible origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is a "purely politically motivated" theory, and that political power games are behind it.

The expert, who participated in the World Health Organization's (WHO) search for the origins of the coronavirus, recently told the German Press Agency that he is aware of no new data that would strengthen the laboratory hypothesis. "It remains the most unlikely hypothesis of all."

Chinese evolutionary biologist Wu Chung-I said claims that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was made by humans represent a terrible regression in scientific thinking -- a regression to the level of a priest more than 200 years ago.

Polish virologist Agnieszka Szuster-Ciesielska recently said in an interview that the COVID-19 lab-leak theory, which has been rehashed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the FBI, is sensation-seeking and has no factual or scientific basis.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning has urged the United States to immediately cease its political manipulation of COVID-19 origins-tracing, and voluntarily share its data on suspected early cases in the United States with the WHO.

For some time now, the United States has been politicizing, weaponizing and instrumentalizing COVID-19 origins-tracing, Mao said. It has allowed a matter of science to become dominated by lawmakers and the intelligence community, and it has spread myths such as the lab-leak theory without any evidence in order to discredit and attack China.