With US deaths from Covid-related complications peaking above 30,000, allies of President Donald Trump are taking their anti-China public relations blitz to new heights of absurdity, hoping to legitimize a conspiracy theory blaming a Chinese biological research lab for engineering the novel coronavirus.

The theory points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the culprit behind the pandemic, either through an accidental leak caused by unsafe research on bat coronaviruses or deliberately, by manufacturing a biological weapon. First deployed in January by the right-wing Washington Times, the conspiracy was dismissed and discredited at the time by journalists and scientists.

With an apparent cue this April from a Trump administration desperate to shift the blame for its feckless coronavirus response, Fox News and the Washington Post have fished the story out of the right-wing’s political wet market and polished it off for public consumption.

Though neither outlet published a single piece of concrete evidence to support their claims, the story has gained traction among even fervently anti-Trump elements of the political establishment.

Regarding the real source of Covid-19, the conclusion by a team of American, British, and Australian researchers could not be more clear: “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible…. Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the virologists stated in a March 17 article published in the scientific journal Nature.

A group of 27 public health scientists from eight countries signed an open letter this March in the Lancet medical journal issuing support to scientists and health professionals in China and “strongly condemn[ing] conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The letter states that the scientific findings to date “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.”

Having spent the past four years railing against the “fake news media” and “deep state” elements in the national security bureaucracy for their campaign to paint him and his allies as Russian collaborators, Trump is now employing the same tactics he condemned to ratchet up conflict with China. By planting fake news about Chinese evildoing through anonymous US officials and dodgy document dumps, the White House appears to hope that an escalated conflict abroad will paper over its failures at home.

Trump’s deployment of conspiracy theories about a Chinese lab not only mirrors the tactics his opponents used to ramp up the Russiagate narrative, it recalls the successful disinformation campaign neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration enacted when they planted a seemingly explosive revelation about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction with New York Times correspondent Judith Miller.

The august reputation of the Times conferred legitimacy on the bunk WMD story, enabling the Bush administration to sell the invasion of Iraq to the Beltway political class across partisan lines. Miller was ultimately exposed as a fraudster and went to jail to protect her neocon sources, but not before thousands of American service members were killed in Iraq and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died in the chaos they spawned.

Today, as the Trump administration ratchets up its propaganda war against China to a disturbing new level, a neoconservative columnist at the Washington Post is filling Miller’s shoes.

The theory that Covid-19 virus escaped from a biological research lab in Wuhan, China was revived on April 14 in a dubiously sourced Washington Post column by Josh Rogin. A neoconservative pundit whose bio lists past work at the Japanese embassy, Rogin has spent years agitating for regime change against the countries comprising the Bush administration’s “axis of evil.”

Toward the end of his article, Rogin admitted, “We don’t know whether the novel coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab.” Up until that point, however, he offered every possible insinuation that the virus had indeed emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. His article appeared to be an intelligence plant that depended heavily on documents dumped by US government officials eager to turn up the heat on China.

The Post columnist’s hypothesis rested largely on a January 2018 cable from the US embassy in Beijing he claimed to have innocently “obtained.” The cable warned that “the [Wuhan] lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.” But as we explain later, Rogin distorted the nature of the research in question and subsequently refused to publish the rest of the US cable when pressed to do so by scientists.

While shielding his credibility behind caveats, Rogin turned to Xiao Qiang, a US-backed regime-change activist deceptively identified as a “research scientist,” to argue the Wuhan lab theory was “a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered.” No virologists or epidemiologists were quoted by Rogin.

Rogin’s article came in for strident criticism by Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a Columbia University virologist, who called his claims about the Chinese lab “extremely vague,” and stated he failed to “demonstrate a clear and specific risk.” But by this point, a disinformation operation apparently guided by the White House was in full swing.

On April 15, the day after Rogin’s op-ed appeared, right-wing Fox News correspondent Bret Baier published a remarkably similar article which stated, “there is increasing confidence that the Covid-19 outbreak likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory…”

Like Rogin, Baier offered no concrete evidence to support his incendiary claim, relying instead on unspecified “classified and open-source documents” from “US sources,” which he admitted he had not personally viewed.

That evening, the arch-neoconservative Republican Senator Tom Cotton launched a carefully choreographed tirade on Fox News. “Bret Baier’s reporting shows that the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for every single death, every job lost, every retirement nest egg lost, from this coronavirus,” Cotton thundered. “And Xi Jinping and his Chinese communist apparatchiks must be made to pay the price.”

The Chinese Communist Party is responsible for every single death, every job lost, every retirement nest egg lost, from this coronavirus. And Xi Jinping must be made to pay the price. pic.twitter.com/OLCj5Z5rrp

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) April 16, 2020

The well-timed spectacle of Cotton’s appearance suggested close coordination between his office, the Trump administration, and their media allies to sell the conspiracy theory to the public.

Meanwhile, leading lights of the liberal anti-Trump commentariat burnished Rogin’s article with the sheen of bipartisan respectability.

After it was shared by New York Magazine columnist Yashar Ali, New York Times columnist Charles Blow expressed his own amazement at the supposedly revelatory column: “I didn’t see this coming.”

Buzzfeed’s Tom Gara went a step further, proclaiming the “escaped from a lab theory” to be “totally plausible” in a tweet sharing the op-ed.

Even the Columbia Journalism Review wrote that Rogin’s piece “contained bombshell new reporting,” ignoring the Washington Post columnist’s well-established history as a publicist for the neoconservative movement.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes also appeared to be taken in by Rogin’s conspiracy:

Yikeshttps://t.co/U45aHsMJuH

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) April 14, 2020

On April 17, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo elevated the baseless theory to the global stage when he stated, “We are still asking the Chinese Communist Party to allow experts to get into that virology lab so that we can determine precisely where this virus began.”

That same day, Trump declared that “it seems to make sense” that the virus had been manufactured in a lab in Wuhan. Like Cotton and Pompeo, he offered no evidence to support his hunch.

TRUMP: "It seems to make sense" that COVID was released from a lab in China pic.twitter.com/mLDit5iAEL

— ᏔმƦ𝔢ჳ💤 (@mooncult) April 17, 2020

Six months away from a presidential election, and in the midst of a gruesome public health crisis that threatened to plunge the US economy into a depression, a fringe conspiracy theory had become the centerpiece of Trump’s culture war against China.

In fact, the story first appeared as a trial balloon launched by a right-wing newspaper in January, back when few in the US were paying close attention to the Covid outbreak.

On January 24, a shocking headline blared from the pages of the Washington Times, a right-wing paper owned by the South Korean cult known as the Unification Church. “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program,” the paper announced.

Its source for the remarkable claim was a former lieutenant colonel in an Israeli military intelligence unit named Danny Shoham. “Coronaviruses [particularly SARS] have been studied in the institute and are probably held therein,” Shoham remarked to the Washington Times, referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Though Shoham suggested “outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility,” he ultimately conceded (as virtually every other expert has so far): “so far there isn’t evidence or indication for such incident.”

Shoham is currently a fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, a Likud Party-linked research center based at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University. A look at his work for the institute reveals a clear dedication to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s agenda, with a particular focus on containing Iran and pressing the case for regime change in Syria.

The Begin-Sadat Center has previously urged the West against defeating ISIS, positing the jihadist group as a “useful tool” in undermining the Syrian government and Iran.

Besides Shoham, the Washington Times cited a broadcast report by Radio Free Asia (RFA) insinuating that the Wuhan Institute of Virology could have been the source of Covid-19.

Left unmentioned was RFA’s role as a US government news agency created during the Cold War as part of a “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the CIA,” in the words of the New York Times.

RFA is operated by the US Agency for Global Media (formerly the Broadcasting Board of Governors), a federal agency of the US government operating under the watch of the State Department. Describing its work as “vital to US national interests,” the US Agency’s primary broadcasting goal is to be “consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States.”

Larry Klayman, a right-wing Republican lawyer with a penchant for filing nuisance suits against political foes, quickly seized on the Washington Times story as the basis for a $20 billion class action lawsuit against China in US federal court. (Senator Cotton and the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society have since called for aggressive US lawfare actions against China over coronavirus.)

Days after the Washington Times article, the paper’s mainstream rival the Washington Post published a lengthy article quoting virologists who refuted the theory that Covid-19 had been engineered, testifying to the quality of research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and pouring cold water on the theory that the virus could have been a bioweapon.

On March 25, two months after its report first appeared, the Washington Times added an editorial note to the article essentially disowning its thesis: “Since this story ran,” the note read, “scientists outside of China have had a chance to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They concluded it does not show signs of having been manufactured or purposefully manipulated in a lab, though the exact origin remains murky and experts debate whether it may have leaked from a Chinese lab that was studying it.”

That same day, Danny Shoham told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “As of now there are still no unequivocal findings that clearly tell us what the source of the virus is.”

The conspiracy theory seemed to have floundered. In its desperation to revive the seemingly dead story over two months later, the Trump administration apparently turned to the same outlet that had initially debunked it: the Washington Post.