Suspicions aired on US virus probe

Chinese embassy calls for science in origin study rather than politicization

The Chinese embassy in the United States on Wednesday expressed concerns that a Washington-directed investigation into the origins of COVID-19 will be politicized.

The embassy called for those involved in the exercise to respect science and the facts.

The administration of President Joe Biden launched the 90-day probe in May. Biden has received a classified report from the intelligence community ahead of its formal release within days, according to The Washington Post. But the report is inconclusive about whether the virus that causes COVID-19 emerged from nature or escaped from a laboratory in China, said the report, which cited two unnamed US officials.

The Chinese embassy, in an opinion article posted on its website on Tuesday, said: "We support and will continue to take a part in a science-based origin tracing, but we oppose a politicized one, and we oppose an origin tracing that goes against the resolution of World Health Assembly and forsakes the WHO-China joint mission report."

As two major countries, China and the US should cooperate on the global pandemic response and vaccine rollout, but some people "are bent on linking the virus to a certain country and using the origins study for political purposes", the article said.

Since the start of the pandemic, there have been conspiracy theories that the virus was leaked from a lab in Wuhan, and those theories have been rejected by the global scientific community, including scientists in the US.

Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health, wrote in a blog on March 26, 2020, that the virus almost certainly originated in nature and that it was not the product of purposeful manipulation in a lab.

Last month, 24 world-renowned medical experts affirmed in The Lancet journal that suggestions of a laboratory-leak source of the pandemic remain without scientifically validated evidence.

Early this month, over 300 political parties, social organizations and think tanks from more than 100 countries and regions submitted a joint statement to the World Health Organization secretariat calling for objectiveness and fairness in investigations into the origins of the virus. It also opposed politicization of these efforts.

The Chinese embassy said the investigation into the virus' origins should follow science and rely on scientists. However, those who try to politicize this matter have "zero interest in science and facts".

The laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology has always remained in a "safe and stable operation", the embassy said in the article. The three bat coronaviruses that the institute has isolated and grown in cultures are distantly related to the COVID-19 virus, the embassy said citing an interview that Shi Zhengli, a top virologist at the institute, gave to Science magazine.

"Growing new evidence shows that the virus may have existed in multiple places before Wuhan reported its first case of pneumonia of unknown cause in late December 2019", so the study on the virus must be conducted in multiple places and countries to find out the truth, the Chinese embassy said in the post.

Regardless of the results of the Biden administration's report, the embassy said, the probe proceeded from a wrong premise that the virus was manufactured virus in a Chinese lab.

Undeniable truth

"The sad but undeniable truth is that the simple existence of that report will put our communities at risk," 23 Asian American and Pacific Islander groups said in a letter to Biden on Aug 19. "When your review was announced, many interpreted it as a validation of the so-called 'lab leak' theory."

These groups are afraid that the government's report will be used to "legitimize racist language" and lead to more violence against Asian communities.

Since March 2020, more than 9,000 anti-Asian incidents have been reported across the US, from verbal abuse to physical attacks, according to Stop AAPI Hate, a platform that tracks such incidents.

A survey by the Pew Research Center earlier this year showed that 20 percent of Asian respondents said anti-Asian violence was increasing, and they noted the surge stemmed from former president Donald Trump's rhetoric about China as the source of the pandemic.

"The hypothesis that COVID originated from Chinese laboratory experiments has sparked a flurry of conspiracy theories that have been weaponized by politicians and pundits resulting in a false scapegoating of Asian Americans as somehow to blame for the pandemic," said the AAPI groups, headed by the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans.

In May, Biden signed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act into law as an effort to counter the rise in crimes against Asians. The groups warned that the release of the report will require Biden to redouble his efforts to combat such violence.