Campaigning politicians have always inflated their own importance and the benefits of the policies they espouse –and exaggerated the perils of electing the other guy. It used to be the case that these self-aggrandizing stump speeches were tempered by a (mostly) diligent press that went out of its way to poke holes in those exaggerations and deflate egos with some sharply pointed facts. And Americans have historically trusted their elected leaders to tell the truth in matters of grave national importance.

Let’s take the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Is this nothing more than naked aggression by a larger country (Russia) run by an ex-KGB agent (President Vladimir Putin) who’s made no bones about wanting some (if not all) of the old Soviet territories back?

That’s the position being pushed by the Biden administration.

Putin, on the other hand, claims not only that parts (if not all) of Ukraine belong to Russia; he has intimated that the United States has been funding the development of possible biowarfare agents at laboratories in Ukraine, and that these pathogens could be used as weapons against Russia.

Until recently, most of us would have tended to believe the statements of our own government over the inflammatory accusations of a former Soviet strongman. But two-plus years of the COVID-19 pandemic has proven that our own government lies to us continuously and repeatedly.

In fact, the similarities between the “Ukraine biolabs” story and the theory that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology are remarkable.

When COVID-19 began spreading throughout China and the rest of the world, the “official” story was that the virus had jumped species (from bat to human, perhaps with an intermediary host) in a wet market in Wuhan. Very quickly, some writers pointed out that the city of Wuhan had an international virology institute. And that bat viruses were being studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And that scientists who worked at WIV had published papers in which they described genetically manipulating those viruses to see if they could be made to “jump species” (so-called gain of function research).

Information continued to seep out. State Department memoranda from 2018 were discovered, warning that research into zoonotic bat viruses being conducted at the WIV lacked adequate safety protocols. Those memoranda mentioned funding by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the organization run by Fauci. Fauci was called before Congress and insisted that the NIAID had never funded “gain of function” research. An October 2021 letter from the NIH proved that this was untrue; the NIAID and the NIH had funded gain of function research in Wuhan.

A Washington Post article from 2005 opens with this statement: “The United States and Ukraine agreed yesterday to work jointly to prevent the spread of biological weapons, signing a pact that clears the way for Ukraine’s government to receive U.S. aid to improve security at facilities where dangerous microbes are kept.” The two U.S. senators spearheading that initiative were Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, and Barack Obama, then a Democratic senator from Illinois.

So, “dangerous microbes” are at these Ukrainian laboratories, and the United States government has (been providing funding. For what, exactly? To “improve security.”

This hardly inspires confidence.

Right on cue, here come the “official” statements. An article published last week in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists quotes Robert Pope, director of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, a “30-year-old Defense Department program that has helped secure the former Soviet Union’s weapons of mass destruction and redirect former bioweapons facilities and scientists toward peaceful endeavors.”

According to Pope, “the labs in Ukraine are not bioweapons facilities … (T)hey are public and animal health labs” that “conduct peaceful scientific research and disease surveillance.”

Predictably, any suspicions about the work conducted in Ukrainian laboratories and funded by the U.S. government are now being dismissed as “disinformation.” Foreign Policy published an article yesterday insisting that the “Ukrainian lab bioweapons” claims are just “conspiracy theories” being advanced by (of course) the Russian and Chinese governments and (wait for it) QAnon supporters who are spreading misinformation on social media as part of the “dogma for the right wing of the Republican Party.”

Sound familiar?

So, what’s really going on in the Ukrainian laboratories? Who do you believe?

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Laura Hollis is a nationally syndicated columnist.