It's crazy for a Trump loyalist to complain about "politicization" of this process when declassifying and releasing a report with no hard or new evidence is quite clearly a political decision.
The US is clearly setting up China to be the next Big Enemy, the USSR 2.0. The US establishment expects--and arguably is fomenting--economic and possibly eventual military conflict with China. The "lab leak" declassification neatly fits into that narrative.
We may never know the truth or it may take decades to find out.
There's really only two likely theories here: zoonotic origin and lab leak. There are many variants of "lab leak" but the most likely is that it was accidental. It's more fringe to claim it was intentional. This sort of thing has happened before [1].
There is circumstancial data for this like China not cooperating with a WHO investigation back in 2020 and 2021 and a Wuhan Institute of Virology virus database in SEptember 2019. To my knowledge, that has never been recovered or examinted by external parties. My theory is, like every government (including the US), China doesn't want to know the answer to this question. There's literally no upside. Would you want to be the official who oversaw a leak like this? Would you want to be in charge of the government at that time? Nobody wants that. Governments love ignorance.
The zoonotic origin is still more likely but it has the obvious problem that we haven't (yet) identified the host animal. Also, Wuhan is quite far from the bats that might be the likely source.
It might be a complicated origin, such as a person or animal being infected with multiple strains and a replication error creating the virus from multiple sources.
But the main point here is we're going to see a lot of anti-China sentiment being drummed up by the US in coming years. This is bipartisan too.
The US is clearly setting up China to be the next Big Enemy, the USSR 2.0. The US establishment expects--and arguably is fomenting--economic and possibly eventual military conflict with China. The "lab leak" declassification neatly fits into that narrative.
We may never know the truth or it may take decades to find out.
There's really only two likely theories here: zoonotic origin and lab leak. There are many variants of "lab leak" but the most likely is that it was accidental. It's more fringe to claim it was intentional. This sort of thing has happened before [1].
There is circumstancial data for this like China not cooperating with a WHO investigation back in 2020 and 2021 and a Wuhan Institute of Virology virus database in SEptember 2019. To my knowledge, that has never been recovered or examinted by external parties. My theory is, like every government (including the US), China doesn't want to know the answer to this question. There's literally no upside. Would you want to be the official who oversaw a leak like this? Would you want to be in charge of the government at that time? Nobody wants that. Governments love ignorance.
The zoonotic origin is still more likely but it has the obvious problem that we haven't (yet) identified the host animal. Also, Wuhan is quite far from the bats that might be the likely source.
It might be a complicated origin, such as a person or animal being infected with multiple strains and a replication error creating the virus from multiple sources.
But the main point here is we're going to see a lot of anti-China sentiment being drummed up by the US in coming years. This is bipartisan too.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...