Dangers of Pompeo and pandemic

On May 3rd 2020, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told ABC News that there was “enormous evidence” to prove that the Covid-19 virus had come from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, but did not reveal the enormous evidence or even a little of it. He comes to Sri Lanka perhaps bearing gifts like the MCC and SOFA. This is a clear case of “Greeks who come bearing gifts” and we have to be careful. Will he tell our leaders that the Covid which is raging in our country at present was introduced to Sri Lanka by China. and point to the fact that the first person detected with the infection was a Chinese, which is enormous evidence. The USA has no scruples regarding ethics or common decency when it comes to pushing its global agenda. They would want to stop Chinese developing their wheel of influence in the world, and Sri Lanka is an irreplaceable cog in that wheel.

The Covid conspiracy theory was first mooted by The Washington Times, which on January 26th 2020 claimed, “Corona virus may have originated in a laboratory linked to China’s bio warfare programme”. President Trump and Pompeo latched on to this idea, and started to issue statements in a desperate attempt to place the blame on China and escape the wrath of the people for the rampaging viral infection in the US and its total mismanagement. On April 18th 2020, Trump during a White House briefing said that the US was looking into the claim that the virus spread from a laboratory in China, which made “sense”. He did not produce any evidence to support his assertion that the idea made sense.

On February 18th, 27 prominent scientists outside China issued a statement in The Lancet which “condemned the conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”, and pointed out that research “overwhelmingly concludes that Coronavirus originate in wildlife”. Further, five prominent scientists said in the Nature Medicine on March 17th that “we do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is possible” . Dr. Fauci, participating in the White House briefing where Trump accused China of conspiracy, said that mutations detected in the Covid virus were totally consistent with the theory that the virus jumped from an animal to human. These opinions made Washington Times to retract its earlier preposterous claim and say that there is no evidence to support a theory that the virus was man-made.

However, all this evidence did not dissuade Trump and Pompeo from making wild allegations against China, and the president called the Covid the “Chinese Virus”. The New York Times reported on April 30th that the Secretary of State Pompeo has pushed US spy agencies to dig up evidence to link a laboratory in China to the origin of the virus. This was in spite of the Inspector General of Intelligence Community reporting on 30th April that the Covid-19 virus was not man-made. And on the same day Trump states that there is “a high degree of confidence” in the theory that the origin of the Covid-19 was linked to a lab in Wuhan, China. And on May 3rd Pompeo told ABC News that there was “enormous evidence” to prove that Covid came from a lab in Wuhan, without producing any of that evidence. However on May 6th he hedges and says “we don’t have certainty” but “there is significant evidence”.

Could a small country like Sri Lanka have any confidence in people like Pompeo, who promises to look after our country and protect it from big powers, which are intent on getting us into debt traps? He is the chairman of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the controversial global aid agency. This agency has two areas of interest, land and transport, irrespective of the country or its needs. Several countries in Africa and Asia have terminated their agreements with Pompeo’s agency, after finding out the adverse effects it had on the sovereignty and independence of their country.

N.A.de S. AMARATUNGA