U.S. Congresswoman Judy Chu accused Trump of blaming China for the pandemic as a strategy to deflect criticism from his administration's handling of the outbreak in the U.S., which now has more COVID-19 cases than any other country in the world.
"It's clear that President Trump is trying to continue to use this anti-China focus (for) his election campaign," Chu said during a webinar. "Right now, this president is actually trying to get votes by being anti-Chinese. He thinks that's the best way for him to stay in office."
U.S. intelligence officials agree with "the wide scientific consensus that the novel coronavirus was not man-made or genetically modified", the White House's top intelligence agency said Thursday.
But the American intelligence community "will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan", the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the clearinghouse for the array of U.S. spy agencies led by Richard Grenell, said in a statement.
Wilson Center disinformation researcher Nina Jankowicz said that putting the blame on a Wuhan lab helps the Trump administration find a scapegoat.
It becomes more politically convenient for Trump and his administration, she said.
Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, commented on Twitter about how the Trump administration has groped to find a direct link between the coronavirus and Chinese labs.
Konyndyk is also critical of the Washington Post's Rogin for publishing excerpts of a two-year-old cable, rather than the cable in its entirety.
"It's irresponsible for political reporters like Rogin [to] uncritically regurgitate a secret 'cable' without asking a single virologist or ecologist or making any attempt to understand the scientific context," tweeted Columbia University virologist Angela Rasmussen.
Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, said that there was no way this could escape a lab and if this escaped a Wuhan lab, [the researchers] would have all gotten sick.
Racaniello said the two claims — that the virus could be human-made and that it could have escaped from a laboratory — had no scientific backing. "No human could ever design this virus."
"Everything I have heard in my 15 years of work with people in that lab has been absolutely normal with what you'd expect from virology labs," said zoologist Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, responding to the rumor that the virus might have come from a lab in Wuhan.
During an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS on Sunday, Daszak also clarified that most pandemics originate in animals, usually wildlife, often bats.
"Nobody has the virus from bats that led to COVID-19," said Daszak. "We've not found it yet. We've found close relatives, but it's not the same virus. So, to my mind, it's not a possibility."
Researchers in the U.S., UK and Australia published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine in mid-March that concluded: "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus."
The odds were extremely high against a lab release as opposed to a natural event, said Kristian Andersen, the lead author of the paper and a specialist in infectious diseases at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, The New York Times reported.
Jonna Mazet, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis, who has worked with and trained researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the past, said a lab accident was "highly unlikely".
