Fort Detrick best place to trace virus origin

The summary of the novel coronavirus origin-tracing report the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence released on Friday does not rule out natural exposure or a lab leak as the cause of the pandemic while suggesting that lack of cooperation by China was hampering the origin-tracing efforts. China has strongly condemned the report.

In late May, US President Joe Biden asked US intelligence agencies, not scientists, to trace the origin of the virus. The very fact that intelligence agencies were assigned to trace the virus's origin made the exercise a political game.

When World Health Organization experts and their Chinese counterparts failed to trace the virus's origin, how can intelligence agents do so, and that too in just 90 days? Security agents are not scientists. No wonder the US intelligence report, in its conclusion, says little more than "the virus was not developed as a biological weapon".

The US' political games will undermine global efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Worse, Biden has said the US and its allies will put more pressure on China to hand over "key information" on the virus' origin.

In other words, US intelligence agencies will continue to stigmatize China for the pandemic. On the global front, they can use that to dominate the narrative on the pandemic and keep their allies together. And domestically, they can claim Biden has adopted a stronger stance against China than the Republicans to garner more votes in the midterm elections.

In other words, the White House was never interested in tracing the origins of the virus. It just wanted to scapegoat China. If US politicians ignore the WHO team's March report that said the virus was "extremely unlikely" to have come from a lab, then a perfect place for origin-tracing would be the US lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland.

－SUN XINGJIE, A PROFESSOR ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AT JILIN UNIVERSITY