US intelligence fears new coronavirus could be weaponized
(Baonghean.vn) - British Express quoted experts as saying that the Pentagon and the US intelligence community have begun to take more seriously the threat that the new strain of Corona virus could be weaponized into a biological weapon by America's enemies.
They stressed that this does not mean that US intelligence officials believe the virus was intentionally created as a weapon and that the US intelligence community is still investigating the origins of the virus. There has been widespread speculation that Covid-19 was developed in a state laboratory near Wuhan, China, where the pandemic first began. However, experts say there is no intelligence or scientific evidence to support the suspicion that the virus came from a research lab in China.
Given the devastation caused by Covid-19 and the rapid spread of the coronavirus, the US intelligence community has begun to look into who could weaponize the virus.
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| The US has begun to focus on investigating the risks of biological weapons. Photo: Getty |
At the same time, the US Department of Defense has also begun to monitor this issue more closely, sources close to the US defense establishment informed Politico.
The risk of the virus being weaponized remains relatively low, a US defense official said, and the department's current focus is on trying to find the origins of the virus and establish exactly what the Chinese government knew about it at the time of its inception.
There have been many accusations against China for deliberately covering up the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak and trying to hide the true impact of the coronavirus in China. It is possible that the country had information about the epidemic as early as November last year, not until December as the international media actually recorded.
But former senior Pentagon officials say a coordinated planning effort is typically deployed to deal with any threat, including the potential deployment of biological weapons.
“A bioweapon is not something that looks like a bullet, it’s just a pathogen,” Andy Weber, assistant secretary of defense under President Obama, told Politico. “In its natural state, the current virus could be used as a bioweapon, or for a country with a more advanced bioweapons program, it could be armed with enhanced properties,” Weber said.
Mr. Weber emphasized that there can be no exception to the threats surrounding Covid-19. According to Mr. Weber, the risk of Covid-19 being weaponized has increased as scientists understand more about the virus, and this may be the reason the US national security community has begun to pay more attention to this threat.
Another former government official said that if bad actors wanted to weaponize the coronavirus, they would likely not manipulate it, because that would leave a trace. The most likely scenario for an attack would be to infect someone with the virus naturally and have that person enter areas where the individuals they want to target are likely to be.
