DUDE, SQUIRRELY IS THEIR STATUS QUO:

In an open letter posted on Medium on Thursday, Christopher Ford, former Assistant Secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation, said he intervened to prevent the US government from "embarrassing and discrediting" itself by accusing China of having deliberately engineered the coronavirus -- despite there being no evidence to make that case.

In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Ford said his colleagues were pushing to include allegations that China had breached the international Biological Weapons Convention in a State Department report to Congress, which could have set off a diplomatic crisis with one of the US's chief global rivals.

It is highly unusual for a former senior State Department official to publish a personal account of recent internal disputes. But Ford's open letter comes in the midst of an acrimonious debate over the so-called "lab leak" hypothesis for the emergence of COVID-19. The most extreme version of this theory suggests that Chinese scientists engineered SARS-CoV-2 as a bioweapon.

Sourcing his account to emails put into the public domain through reporting by Fox News and Vanity Fair, Ford's Medium post detailed his increasingly fraught relationship with David Asher, a contractor in the State Department who was running its investigation into the origins of COVID-19, and Thomas DiNanno, former acting head of the department's Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance (AVC). According to Vanity Fair, Asher and DiNanno viewed Ford as pushing a preconceived conclusion that the virus had a natural origin.

In the Medium post, Ford said that DiNanno signaled that the investigation was focusing on "China allegedly having violated the Biological Weapons Convention by creating the virus." He added: "They seemed to believe that COVID-19 was a biological weapons (BW) effort gone awry -- or perhaps even a BW agent deliberately unleashed upon the world."

"They clearly appeared to be coming at this from a biological weapons angle," Ford told BuzzFeed News. "They got squirrelly if you pushed back on whether there was evidence to support a biological weaponry finding over the coronavirus, but they seemed to be trying to build a case."

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