US responsible for global spread of COVID-19

Editor’s note: The Intelligence & Alliance Think Tank and the Taihe Institute on Dec 24 released a joint research report. According to the report, data from multiple sources show that the United States is most likely the country where COVID-19 originated, and the country most responsible for the fast global spread of the virus. Its political manipulation of the disease has made the global anti-pandemic efforts particularly difficult and challenging. Following is the full text of the English version of the report, which was published on Dec 25:

Introduction

Against the backdrop of a still dire global pandemic situation, some US politicians have kept scapegoating China on COVID-19 origins-tracing in an attempt to muddle the truth, cover up their responsibility for the pandemic fiasco, and undermine global anti-pandemic cooperation. Their moves and remarks have been widely questioned and criticized by the international community.

Data from multiple sources have shown that the United States is most likely the country where COVID-19 originated, and the country most responsible for the fast global spread of the virus. Its political manipulation of the disease has made the global anti-pandemic efforts particularly difficult and challenging.

The US is to blame for the current messy pandemic situation. If it does not correct its mistakes, and start to work with others in the world’s pandemic fight immediately, humanity is going to face even greater disasters.

I: Evidence indicating COVID-19 originated from the US keeps showing up

The US has attempted to cover up its misdeeds by shifting the blame to others even to this day. It has been busy politicizing origins-tracing and smearing China, and has turned a deaf ear to questions from around the world. The country has become even more dubious as it has refused to release information on America’s early cases and to undertake domestic investigation on COVID-19 origins.

The probe and analysis into the COVID-19 origins by authoritative agencies around the world, including those from the US, have become increasingly clear along with the development of the pandemic. Evidence is also piling up, indicating that the US, a country with the longest history of coronavirus research and the most advanced research capacity, could be the origin of the pandemic.

1. The timeline of the outbreak in the US has been continuously backdated.

According to media reports, the first COVID-19 case in the US was confirmed on Jan 19, 2020, in a man who returned home in the US state of Washington from travel.

But through deeper investigations, local governments in the US have identified earlier infections and deaths from the disease.

Starting from March 2020, the Department of Health website of the US state of Florida published records showing 171 patients had coronavirus symptoms or positive test results in January and February that year. The entire dataset disappeared from the website on May 4, 2020, only to return later in the evening without the column showing the date when those patients developed symptoms.

In an antibody testing study published on June 15, 2020, researchers with the US National Institutes of Health analyzed more than 24,000 stored blood samples that were collected between Jan 2 and March 18 that year.

According to the serology test theory, antibodies can be found about two weeks after a person being infected. In this study, the first positive sample came as early as Jan 7, 2020, from a volunteer in the US state of Illinois, suggesting the virus was present in the US before mid-December in 2019, a month earlier than the first case officially reported in the country.

Besides, research published on March 30, 2020, in the New England Journal of Medicine, probed into 24 critically-ill patients in the US city of Seattle. Those infected were identified by nine hospital intensive care units in the city between Feb 24 and March 9 that year.

“None of the patients had recently traveled to a country with known transmission, such as China, South Korea, Iran, or Italy,” said the case series.

“Genomic and epidemiologic analyses of sequenced virus RNA recovered in the western Washington region have shown that the spread of SARSCoV-2 has been the result of local community transmission — meaning that the source of infection cannot be traced back to a known exposure,” it added.

The above findings coincide with a diachronic study of the private think tank, IATT, on the “patient zero” of COVID-19. IATT’s report, titled Who is “Patient Zero,” cited an article with the title of “Deadly Germ Research is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns,” which was published in the New York Times on Aug 5, 2019, and a study on COVID-19 origins based on big data modeling, which was published on Sept 22 this year on ChinaXiv, an online pre-print platform operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The studies indicated that for 12 northeastern US states, the possible dates of the first infection, with a probability of 50 percent, fall mostly between August and October 2019, while the earliest is April 26, 2019, on Rhode Island, and the latest is Nov 30, 2019, in Delaware. All of the dates indicated by the data are earlier than Jan 20, 2020, the officially announced date of the first confirmed case in the US.

Researches have revealed that the spread of a virus is a complicated issue in a globalized world, and therefore, the global tracing of COVID-19 origins

The irresponsible

requires persistent efforts. Liu Lili, IATT’s secretary-general, said that the first place that reported a large-scale outbreak is not necessarily the origin of the epidemic, adding that Washington’s plot of politicizing an academic issue is falling apart.

2. The role of US military is implicated in the origin and spread of COVID-19.

The US was the first to start research in recombinant virus and possesses unrivalled strength in this area. It has also funded and conducted more research in coronaviruses than any other country. Before 2015 the team of Dr Ralph Baric with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had developed the most advanced technology on recombinant coronaviruses, and acquired genetic sequences of coronaviruses from their studies in collaboration with a military biolab at Fort Detrick. The lab was abruptly shut down by the US military over suspected leakages in July 2019. The closure of the lab was followed by reports of outbreaks of pneumonia of unknown cause with similar symptoms as COVID-19 in the surroundings of Fort Detrick. The possibility that Fort Detrick is the origin of the pandemic cannot be ruled out.

On March 10, 2020, a petition was launched on the White House’s website, demanding that Washington unveil information about Fort Detrick, the country’s prominent lab on biological weapons, as well as the real reason for its closure, and clarify whether there was a virus leak. However, Washington has so far refused to tell the public the truth on the pretext of “national security concerns.” On July 12, 2019, the ABC News reported a deadly “respiratory outbreak,” in which 54 people had developed fever, cough and general weakness and two died, at a retirement community in northern Virginia, just an hour’s drive from Fort Detrick.

3. Early cases in many countries are linked to the US.

COVID-19 outbreaks in many countries have been traced to the US. Official information from 12 countries, including Costa Rica, Bhutan, Guyana and Kenya, indicated that “patient zero” in those countries were from the US.

According to a report released by Japan’s Keio University School of Medicine in February 2021, a research team performed SARS-CoV-2 wholegenome sequencing of specimens from 198 patients with COVID-19 at 13 collaborating hospitals located in the Kanto region. The viral lineages were differentiated and classified. The team found that one sample from a COVID-19 patient admitted to a hospital in the Kanto region in November 2020 belonged to the B.1.346 lineage of Clade 20C, which has been prevalent in the western US since November 2020.

According to research of Tel Aviv University, most of the infections in Israel were caused by a SARS-CoV-2 strain imported from the US. The researchers compared the genomic sequences of over 200 patients at hospitals across Israel to some 4,700 genomic sequences taken from patients around the world. They found that about 70 percent of the patients had been infected by a coronavirus strain that originated in the US. Canada said on April 30, 2020, that the country’s early COVID-19 cases mainly came from the US. Data from Canada’s four major provinces (Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia), also the four hardest-hit ones, have shown that it was American travelers who brought the virus to the country.

II. The US is the main force of global COVID-19 spread

As the country with the highest numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths in the world, the US has not yet walked out of the abyss of the pandemic. The Delta variant is spreading at a faster speed, leading to sharp daily increases of confirmed cases in the US. So far, the country’s confirmed cases have exceeded 48 million, and the death toll has surpassed 790,000.

An editorial published by the US-based New England Journal of Medicine said the US has “failed at almost every step” in handling the pandemic. Following the outbreak of the pandemic, Washington’s various error-ridden internal and foreign policies have not only caused the collapse of its own pandemic control, but also accelerated the spread of the global pandemic. The US has repatriated illegal migrants, opened for travel, rotated its troops in foreign countries, and conducted military exercises. These unconventional moves have introduced US domestic COVID-19 infections into other countries and regions, and made the country become the major force that prompted the large scale spread of the global pandemic.

1. Missing the best time to control the pandemic at early stage

The US once misjudged the COVID-19 as flu, making it more difficult to detect the pandemic in its early stage. From June 28 to October 3, 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) received over 1,000 cases of vaping-related pneumonia, with 18 deaths and a mortality rate of nearly 2 percent. The CDC officials admitted that they have some “early cases of COVID-19 that were misdiagnosed as flu or other illness”, but so far it has not released details of those cases.

According to the New York Times, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services has warned the potential severity of the pandemic as early as January 18, 2020, but the White House ignored it. From late January to the end of March, the White House turned a deaf ear to warnings from the WHO, American experts and data models and still acted slowly, resulting in the rapid spread of the pandemic across the country. With the most developed medical system in the world, the US failed to prevent and control the coronavirus in its early stage, and paid less attention to it, damaging the health of the American people. Meanwhile, the world has been not able to share the country’s advanced experience in prevention, control and medical treatment, and the global capacity of pandemic prevention and control has been greatly undermined.

2. Open-door policy exacerbated global spread

Affected by many factors such as the strong concept of so-called “human rights and freedom,” the weak quality of natural science knowledge of the people at the bottom, federalism and the presidential election, the US has not implemented science-based pandemic prevention measures, with frequent flow of people in the country and lax policies on outbound travel. The irresponsible and lax outbound travel measures taken by the US, which is at the epicenter of the pandemic, have directly caused the global outbreak of the pandemic.

While most countries are imposing strict prevention and control measures during the pandemic, the US adopted a laissez-faire policy. Some basic measures, including wearing masks, social distancing and practicing stay-at-home order, have not yet become a consensus in the US society. The lack of timely lockdown measures has accelerated the spread of pandemic across the US. Mutated viruses are circulating wantonly, and

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