The Facts
In a BBC interview, George Gao, the former director of China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said the theory that COVID originated from a lab leak shouldn't yet be excluded due to a lack of evidence.
He also acknowledged for the first time that the Chinese government had conducted an investigation into the lab leak hypothesis, though he said that "they haven’t found wrongdoing."
The Spin
Pro-China narrative
As opposed to the politicized, disingenuous debate over COVID in the US, China has followed the science. Allowing intelligence agencies — which are political in nature — to investigate the origins of a virus should tell you everything you need to know about the US agenda. Washington is now trying to use COVID to demonize Beijing and gain the upper hand on the global stage. Reports on the so-called lab leak are nothing but Western propaganda.
Anti-China narrative
If China wanted to claim ethical superiority surrounding the COVID origin debate, it should have allowed for a completely independent World Health Organization investigation when it finally allowed the agency to investigate in 2021 rather than hovering over it under the pretense of safety. Since the beginning, China has blocked outside investigators from its laboratories and even its borders, which shows it has no interest in getting to the truth of the matter.
Cynical narrative
COVID and its deadly impact on the world may have been in the making for much longer than anyone could imagine. The US government began testing coronaviruses in dogs and pigs in 1965, then Pfizer patented its first COVID spike protein vaccine in 1990. The US public health establishment, headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, has been researching COVID — and its potential profitability — for decades, but we've been led to believe that it all mysteriously appeared out of nowhere in 2019.