US uses COVID- 19 probe for own political purposes
Should ask for investigation of possible early cases
If the Biden administration wants to project itself as a responsible government that respects science, it should dispatch scientists and allow a WHO team to investigate the origins of the coronavirus on US soil, instead of repeating his predecessor’s tactic of milking this subject to throw mud on China or serve its other political purposes, said analysts and Chinese epidemiologists.
The remarks came after US news outlet Politico reported on Wednesday that senior officials of the Trump administration decided in the spring of 2020 to strongly imply that COVID- 19 came from a Chinese lab, even though intelligence officials investigating the pandemic’s origins did not have conclusive evidence supporting that hypothesis.
Politico said that some officials in the White House, the National Security Council and the State Department had urged the US to blame China for covering up the pandemic’s origins and to allege that it came from a research facility in Wuhan that specialized in the study of dangerous bat pathogens – a move that they described as going on the diplomatic offensive.
The goal, officials said, was in part to pressure China to allow the US and the international community access to Wuhan to investigate, Politico said.
Combining this report with Biden’s actions, they said the current administration is trying to differentiate itself from the previous one on finding the virus’ origins.
“But at the end, they are all the same, ‘ just milk the subject to attack China’,” Zhang Tengjun, an assistant research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, told the Global Times.
The scoop came as US President Joe Biden spared no efforts peddling the lab leak theory and tried to pin the blame on China during his trip to Europe. Before leaving Europe, Biden said on Wednesday in Geneva, Switzerland that it remained unclear whether Beijing was really trying to understand the origins of the coronavirus.
The president ordered US intelligence agencies to look at whether the virus was leaked from a Wuhan lab, and asked the groups to report back to him within 90 days.
“If you think about it, who would put such a short time limit on something so complicated as tracing the origin of an unknown virus?
“Aren’t they afraid that the mission will fail, or they will end up getting a result they don’t want? Or unless the man giving the order already gave a preset answer to the so- called investigation team,” Zhang said.
But the US better watch out. Maybe before it hurls any stones at China, it will be obliged to check the virus origins story on its own soil, said Chinese observers.
A study of more than 24,000 samples taken for a National Institutes of Health research program in the US between January 2 and March 18, 2020 suggested that seven people in five states – Illinois, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – may have been infected well before the country’s first confirmed cases, which were reported on January 21.
Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Global Times on Thursday that the NIH study is very important for finding the virus’ origins.