Time for US to trace virus origin on its soil

By Lai Tung-kwok

Cai Meng/China Daily

US President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan has caused chaos and created a humanitarian crisis in the country.

The US military intelligence community’s capabilities and effectiveness are once again being seriously questioned as it was confident of the drive and determination of the Afghan forces under former president Ashraf Ghani and expected it to fight the Taliban for 90 days, even longer, but the Ghani government collapsed in nine days.

This is not the only instance of the Biden administration seriously misjudging a situation.

At the end of May, Biden ordered intelligence officials to “redouble” efforts to trace the origins of SAR-CoV-2 within 90 days.

As expected, the US intelligence community’s report did not reach the conclusion the Biden administration wanted, because it had to base its findings on facts.

The Biden administration has used the pretext of national security to declare the full virus origin tracing report as classified, and published only a summary of the report.

The lack of transparency is intended to keep the public in the dark about the amount and of data collected, studied and analyzed, and the detailed conclusions reached by the investigation team.

The US administration has made public only some vague conclusions without giving any reasons to support them.

The end result is that “we are not sure” about the origins of the novel coronavirus. Interestingly, even the intelligence agencies seem divided on whether the virus jumped from nature to humans or leaked from a laboratory.

This is not surprising, because only scientists, including epidemiologists and virologists, can trace the origins of a virus. So a thorough research needs to be conducted by medical experts and international organizations such as the World Health Organization, not by intelligence agencies with predetermined political objectives, to trace the origins of the virus.

The fact that the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, Hubei province, is near the market where the first COVID-19 case in China was reported is being used by some foreign countries to politicize the pandemic and stigmatize China is ridiculous, and against the basic norms of international relations.

What about the mysterious closure of Fort Detrick, home to the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in August 2019 due to safety concerns?

Up to now, the US authorities have not provided any details about why Fort Detrick was closed.

But we know that three months later, in October 2019, about 3,000 strange pneumonia-like cases were reported in Frederick County, Maryland, where Fort Detrick is located.

Emerging evidence suggest the novel coronavirus appeared in Europe before the first case in China was detected. And in the US, even the mayor of Belleville in New Jersey has said that he contracted COVID-19 in November 2019.

If the Biden administration is still keen on virus origin tracing, it should invite the WHO to conduct a thorough study on those unknown pneumonia cases and the experiments carried out at Fort Detrick with the highest degree of transparency and cooperation. Only by doing so can the Biden administration come clean.

The author is executive vice-chairman of New People’s Party in Hong Kong. 

CHINA DAILY