President Joe Biden’s reported pick to be U.S. ambassador to China condemned the Trump administration for playing the “blame game” with Beijing over responsibility for the coronavirus pandemic and decried former President Donald Trump for “passing the buck” when pointing to the Wuhan lab as its possible origin.
Nicholas Burns, an ambassador during the Clinton administration and State Department official during George W. Bush’s presidency, took to Twitter in May 2020 to attack Trump for suggesting the virus emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Harvard professor and presidential campaign adviser for Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also spent months critiquing America’s war of words with China, as Chinese Communist Party officials baselessly claimed that the coronavirus originated with the U.S. military while the U.S. government pushed back. The State Department and U.S. intelligence community stated that it was confident from early on that the pandemic began in China. Burns also alleged that Trump was using China as a “scapegoat” to help himself politically.
“China owes it to the world to be more transparent about COVID-19. But Trump asserting the virus came from a Chinese government lab+threatening to sue for reparations is feckless and reckless without evidence,” Burns tweeted on May 1, 2020. “Passing the buck?”
The former ambassador included a link in his tweet to a New York Times article that alleged Trump officials pushed U.S. spy agencies “to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory” about the Wuhan lab and that this “escalates a public campaign” by Trump “to blame China for the pandemic.” The article continued, claiming that experts “have ruled out the notion that it was concocted as a bioweapon” and “agree that the new pathogen began as a bat virus that evolved naturally, probably in another mammal, to become adept at infecting and killing humans.” The piece noted that “a few scientists and national security experts have pointed to a history of lab accidents infecting researchers to suggest it might have happened in this case, but many scientists have dismissed such theories.”
The article Burns shared also quoted from a Nature article from March 2020, in which scientists asserted that “we do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
Newly-released emails show Dr. Anthony Fauci quietly worked behind the scenes to help cast doubt on the Wuhan lab leak possibility, including by sharing articles with reporters that critiqued the possibility that COVID-19 may have escaped from a Chinese lab. One such article, which he appeared to have given some sort of input on, was the piece published in Nature by microbiologist Kristian Andersen and other scientists, which would be widely cited to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis. Andersen had sent Fauci an email on March 6, 2020, to “thank you again for your advice and leadership as we have been working through the SARS-CoV-2 ‘origins’ paper” for Nature, and Fauci replied, saying, “Nice job on the paper.” In late January 2020, Andersen had emailed Fauci that “some of the features” of COVID-19 “(potentially) look engineered.”
Burns wrote an op-ed for Foreign Affairs on March 25, 2020, in which he criticized both the Trump administration and the Chinese government for the verbal battle over the origins of COVID-19.
“The low point of this crisis politically has been the failure of Washington and Beijing to set aside broader tensions and combine forces to combat the pandemic. If anything, distrust and hostility between the United States and China have gotten worse,” Burns wrote. “During the last few weeks, they have fought a running war of words over who is ultimately responsible for the pandemic. Chinese officials set a low bar by claiming — falsely and outrageously — that the U.S. military planted the virus in Wuhan to weaken China. But Trump has not helped by referring to COVID-19 as the ‘Chinese virus.’ For the sake of both their own citizens and the rest of the world, Washington and Beijing must stop the blame game and start working together.”
SPY OFFICE CONFIRMS AT LEAST ONE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY IS LEANING TOWARD COVID LAB LEAK HYPOTHESIS
In one notable exchange, Chinese Foreign Ministry propagandist Lijian Zhao shared a conspiracy website article about COVID-19 originating with the U.S., tweeting on March 12, 2020, “This article is very much important to each and every one of us. Please read and retweet it. COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the U.S.” Jonah Goldberg, a conservative columnist, tweeted back at the Chinese official, saying, “You should be ashamed of yourself and your government. My God what’s wrong with you?”
Burns then jumped in, quote-tweeting Goldberg, saying, “China accuses the U.S. of planting the CoronaVirus in Wuhan. Trump officials call it the ‘Wuhan Virus.’ What we need — desperately — is mature global leadership. We’re all in the same boat.” Goldberg replied, “I agree about what we need. But are you suggesting the two things are equivalent?” Burns said, “No. The Chinese accusation against the U.S. is patently false and malicious. But Trump officials calling it the Wuhan virus is also provocative and needlessly confrontational. We need to pull together globally and stop the blame game.”
Chinese diplomats have continued to push the U.S. military theory, dismissed as “completely absurd,” “ridiculous,” and “irresponsible” by former Defense Secretary Mark Esper. China revived its peddling of the theory as the deeply flawed WHO-China joint study COVID-19 report was being made public.
Burns repeatedly returned to similar themes, tweeting on March 11, 2020, “COVID-19 is not a ‘foreign virus.’ It is a global threat that can only be resolved by working with, and not against, all the other nations of the world. … [Trump] should close ranks to work with China, Japan, South Korea, Europe+Iran. Instead, he thinks we can dig a moat around America.”
Trump’s travel restrictions against China were declared on Jan. 31, 2020, and in early March, travel restrictions were imposed on Europe.
Burns leveled similar criticisms during other 2020 speeches and interviews. During a Wiener Conference Call on March 23, 2020, Burns lamented: “Right now, we’re all witnessing a war of words. The Chinese have made a preposterous, untrue, and shameful assertion, and they’re doing this through the spokespeople of their government. They say that the crisis began because the U.S. army planted a weapon, a virus in the city of Wuhan. There is no basis for this. It’s entirely untrue. It’s meant because they’re an authoritarian country and government to deflect attention from their own failings and to put it on us. At the same time, President Trump personally calls this the ‘Chinese virus’ or the ‘Wuhan virus.’ We all know that’s wrong. We all know it’s racist. We all know it’s not true. The virus doesn’t know boundaries.”
Burns also said he wouldn’t have predicted that the U.S. and China would compete instead of cooperating during the pandemic and claimed during a Chatham House discussion on June 9, 2020, that the U.S. was accusing China of false things.
“I frankly wouldn’t have predicted this. … I would have thought back on March 7 or 8 [2020] that the United States and China would’ve put aside their white-hot competition for power and would’ve combined forces, at least to help get the data right so that epidemiologists could model the disease and do something to work together on a vaccine. And, as you saw, it didn’t happen,” Burns said. “They’ve accused each other of the most outrageous things, both incorrectly, and for the No. 1 and [No. 2], or the co-powers in the world, to essentially not lead in any way, shape, or form is disgraceful.”
Burns did add at the time, “I think we have to ask a lot of tough questions of the Chinese government. The Chinese government was not transparent with the rest of us. … So I think [it’s] very important that China be asked to be more transparent or leveraged to be more transparent.”
Burns also signed on to a letter in April 2020 that criticized the Chinese government but also said an investigation into COVID-19’s origins should be pushed off.
Trump said last week that he has “very, very little doubt” COVID-19 originated at a Wuhan laboratory, and Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Trump, said earlier this year that COVID-19 likely originated from an accidental escape from the Wuhan lab.
The intelligence community confirmed last week that at least one of its 18 spy agencies is leaning toward the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis on COVID-19’s origins while two are leaning toward a natural origin, with the vast majority remaining undecided.
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Officials from both the Trump and Biden administrations have said the Chinese government worked for over a year to thwart an independent investigation into the origins of the virus, which has killed 3.7 million people worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University.
