Why US needs biolabs and how COVID comes into picture

As Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev has said in an interview with the Kommersant newspaper the other day, Moscow has reason to believe that biological weapons are being developed in laboratories of the post-Soviet space.

 In particular, he urged drawing focus towards the so-called research centers for disease control and prevention, which, as the Security Council Secretary believes, may be engaged in conducting not only peaceful research, if at all.

There is no prize for guessing who benefits from changing the global security system. The "hand" of the United States tells a mile off.

Nikolai Patrushev noted that US-controlled biological laboratories are mushrooming next to the Russian and Chinese borders.

 "Truth be told, the authorities of the countries where these sites are located have no idea what is happening behind their walls. Certainly, we, and our Chinese partners, have questions in this regard. We are being told that peaceful sanitary and epidemiological stations are operating near our borders, but for some reason they seem more reminiscent of Fort Detrick in Maryland where the Americans have been working on military biology research for decades," Patrushev said.

By the way, the Russian Security Council Secretary pointed out back in 2019 that the United States had commissioned more than 200 biological laboratories across the globe.

As China's Global Times reported, after Nikolai Patrushev's statement that the United States is developing bioweapons in laboratories located at the borders of Russia and China, the number of pleas for checking the mysterious labs is on the rise.

 Experts say an inspection visit may provide coronavirus origin data. However, Washington ignores the international community when asked about checking its secretive biological laboratories.

In this regard, Thursday saw spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry Zhao Lijian urge the United States to respond to the voiced concerns and provide full information on the activities in the field of biological weapons development both inside and outside the country.

 He also called on Washington to stop obstructing attempts to create verification mechanisms under the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) approved by the UN General Assembly in 1971.

It should be noted here that Moscow and Beijing's anxiety about US laboratories close to the borders of Russia and China is not groundless. After all, the United States has biolabs in 25 countries around the world – in the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, the former Soviet Union.

 In Ukraine alone, there are 16 of them. Other locations are Georgia (just take the Richard Lugar Center in the suburbs of Tbilisi), Azerbaijan, Armenia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Massive outbreaks of measles and other dangerous infectious diseases have been reported in some of these places.

According to competent Israeli military and political expert Yakov Kedmi, the goals of US biological laboratories are readily determined by their operating conditions and principles. He says the central feature is their subordination to the Pentagon, which completely negates Washington's arguments about these facilities' "peaceful" origin.

 If the laboratories were controlled by scientific organizations or international structures, their threat could be challenged, but these centers are directly subordinate to and funded by the United States military command.

Kedmi is convinced that any country's Ministry of Defense won't apply huge resources to purely peaceful scientific research. At the same time, the United States deliberately chooses states that can be manipulated point-blank for its biolabs. Ukraine is a pretty example, with all of its strategic facilities controlled by the United States, while country leaders are only doing things by Washington's authority.

It is no secret that Russia and China, being America's key strategic opponents, are the priority targets, for which reason Washington has created these laboratories in their neighboring countries, where they can be attacked from with biological or bacteriological weapons. In this respect, pundits accentuate several possible scenarios for the use of US biolabs, in which they are potentially toxic to Russia and China.

The first option is an epidemiological attack, providing for a spread of a dangerous virus from the territory of one of the neighboring countries. The second one is a large-scale epidemic in the territory of a neighboring country with subsequent accusation of Moscow and Beijing.

The third one is a technological disaster in areas where the United States develops biological weapons. Each of the options may deal a crippling blow to the residents of Russia and China.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which has been raging on the planet for the second straight year, has clearly demonstrated this. The coronavirus has actualized the issue of mankind's vulnerability to various infections, including those of artificial origin.

Hence the question of world's existing developments of biological and bacteriological weapons. For this reason, it immediately makes one wonder why US biological laboratories are scattered throughout the world, with the military supervising their efforts whose nature is carefully concealed from the global community. The reason for that is simple – the United States basically hides its biological weapons program.

 At the same time, the Americans may be creating not just biological weapons, but ethnic weapons aimed to eliminate the Russians and the Chinese in the first instance. And if the United States is sort of a biolab performance copyright holder, maybe it should better look after its own nation's safety amid the current COVID-19 pandemic threat, instead of continuing to contrive ways of annihilating other peoples? After all, the United States currently bears the world's palm in the number of coronavirus infections and deaths.

________________________________________________________________Sergey Sayenko, is an international observer who has covered Eastern European politics for over two decades