Chinese push WHO probe of US Ft. Detrick lab

More than half a million Chinese netizens have signed a joint letter to the World Health Organization (WHO) as of press time on Sunday, demanding the organization conduct an investigation into the US’ Fort Detrick lab, a place whose sudden shutdown is still shrouded in secrecy, which has not been subject to any scrutiny from the international community.

They believe a thorough probe into the US lab could prevent a future epidemic. The move came as certain Western politicians and media stirred up a new round of the smear campaign of pinpointing China as the culprit for the coronavirus origin.

A group of Chinese netizens drafted the joint open letter to ask the WHO to investigate the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (Usamriid) at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

They entrusted the Global Times with posting the letter on its WeChat and Weibo platforms on Saturday to solicit a public response. It has garnered half a million signatures within 24 hours.

They said in the letter that to prevent the next epidemic, the WHO should pay special attention to labs that are conducting studies on dangerous viruses or even on biochemical weapons.

The open letter particularly noted the Fort Detrick lab, which stores the most deadly and infectious viruses in the world, including Ebola, smallpox, SARS, MERS and the novel coronavirus. The leak of them would cause severe danger to the world.

“But this lab has a notorious record on lab security. There have been scandals of anthrax bacterium from the lab being stolen, causing poisoning to many and even death.

There has been a leakage incident in the lab in the autumn of 2019 right before the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic, however, detailed information had been withheld by the US under excuses of national security,” said the letter.

The information unveiled by the US media has worried the world and some have questioned whether the novel coronavirus could be linked to the US lab.

The Usamriid was temporarily shut down in 2019 after a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention inspection. Although this mysterious lab reported the reason for the closure as “ongoing infrastructure issues with wastewater decontamination,” the explanation was not persuasive enough.

In a recent example in June, a research study run by the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program found evidence of Covid-19 infections in the United States as early as December 2019, weeks before the first documented infection in the country.

Wuhan recorded China’s earliest Covid-19 symptoms from a patient on Dec. 8, 2019.