Trace Covid with science, not politics
RECENTLY, US politicians have been racking their brains to politicise the issue of Covid-19’s origins tracing, making up and spreading malicious rumours to stigmatise China and shift the blame for America’s failed Covid19 response.
In collusion with intelligence agencies, it concocted the “lab-leak theory” and made a “presumption of guilt” against China. The US has been suppressing, coercing and threatening international organisations and global scientists, attempting to silence the voices that advocate a science-based approach of origins tracing and uphold justice.
At the onset of the pandemic outbreak, American politicians and the media turned a blind eye to the raging domestic epidemic and became obsessed with weaving and circulating disinformation, such as “China virus” and “Wuhan virus”, to discredit China.
While the domestic epidemic has been increasingly deteriorating and becoming an out-and-out national disaster, instead of focusing on the epidemic prevention and control, they further intensified the smear campaign against China and the buck-passing game.
In May this year, US President Joe Biden ordered intelligence agencies to “redouble” efforts to investigate the origins of Covid-19, including the theory that it came from a laboratory in China, and report back to him within 90 days.
The move has aroused grave concern about the politicisation of this scientific issue in the world, and has been firmly opposed by global scientists. By employing intelligence personnel, setting a deadline, and even presetting results, it has been laid bare that the US will frame and discredit China by any foul means in the name of investigation of the virus’s origins.
The “washing powder incident” in Iraq and the “white helmet video” in Syria have proved to be masterpieces of a conspiracy by intelligence agencies, and are fresh in people’s memory.
It seems that the US replays its old tricks again on Covid-19’s origins tracing.
The American scientists who advocate the “natural origin of the virus” or oppose the groundless accusations against China were politically persecuted.
Some of them have been investigated by the government, and some have even received “death threats” with bullets.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who explicitly opposed conspiracy theories such as “virus artificial” and “lab-leak theory” in the early days of the pandemic, was denounced by American politicians as a “liar” and someone who had “lost the trust of the American people”.
Peter Daszak, an American animal disease specialist who joined the World Health Organization-China joint study team, has been forced to withdraw from research projects, shut down social media accounts and resign because he admitted that “Chinese colleagues are frank and trustworthy”.
In March this year, WHO released the Joint Report by the WHO-China joint study team, and concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus spread from a lab leak in Wuhan.
However, under the fierce threat and pressure of the US, the WHO Secretariat overturned the conclusion and put forward a highly politicised work plan on the second phase of investigation into the origins of Covid-19.
China has no choice but to resolutely oppose the movement, and China’s position has received widespread support in the world.
Up to now, 70 countries have expressed support for the WHO-China joint study report and opposed politicising origins tracing, more than 300 political parties, social organisations and think tanks, and many experts and scholars from 100-plus countries have expressed their stance of opposing politicisation of origins tracing.
At the same time, the US politicians and the media have remained unusually and worryingly silent on the clues and questions related to Covid19 origins tracing in the US. For example, Professor Ralph Baric’s dangerous coronavirus modification technique is widely used in the research programmes of US official and military labs in USAMRIID and IRF-Frederick at Fort Detrick.
USAMRIID and IRF-Frederick, the two institutes that use the dangerous virus technique, as well as Baric’s lab in North Carolina, all have poor security records and involve BSL-4 labs where the most dangerous virus researches are conducted.
A mysterious and large-scale EVALI outbreak occurred in 2019, before Covid-19, the symptoms of the disease are very similar to Covid-19. Some of the Western athletes who participated in the Wuhan Military World
Games in October 2019 claimed that they later got sick with Covid-19-like symptoms, so the cases of the five sick Americans who went to the games are valuable clues as well.
There are many other related facts and clues. Yet US politicians and the media shrugged off all these facts and clues as well as the appeal of more than 25 million Chinese for a probe into labs at Fort Detrick, and played dumb to the calls from the international community for origins tracing in many places across the world. Instead, it has kept targeting China and fabricating rumours and lies to denigrate China.
An article, published in Vanity Fair on June 3 this year, may shed some light on this puzzle. It said that the former acting assistant secretary of the US State Department claimed that staff warned leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of Covid-19” because it would “’open a can of worms’ if it continued”.
It is wishful thinking for the US that this cover-up tactic will work. What the US wants to hide will eventually come to light.