Washington biggest hindrance to origin tracing

The United States government has signed the so-called COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 into law. The act distorts the facts by hyping up the theory that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab.

By doing so, the US has exposed to the world its malign intentions. Since the onset of the pandemic, the US has been convulsed by partisan quarrels and political polarization, which caused its failure in pandemic-prevention policies. In order to cover up their failures, US politicians have repeatedly tried to sensationalize the "lab leak" theory.

The US has severely disturbed the global cooperation on scientific origin-tracing studies and international public health governance. COVID-19 origin-tracing should be a scientific job done by impartial expert teams. It should also be carried out across the world, instead of in China only. By politicizing the task, the US has set the biggest obstacle to completing it successfully.

For years, the US has been impeding rather than supporting the origin-tracing work. It claims to attach great importance to the job, but has never invited World Health Organization expert groups to do any study in the US, never provided information on suspected cases in the early stage of the pandemic in the US, and even politically suppressed some outspoken scientists, turning a deaf ear to the global society's concern about its Fort Detrick biological lab.

As the world's only nation that opposes restarting negotiations for the Biological Weapons Convention protocol, the nation with the biggest number of biological labs all over the world, as well as the nation with the highest COVID-19 death toll, the US is not qualified to take the lead in tracing the origin of the pandemic.

China supports the global scientific origin-tracing efforts and opposes politicizing the issue. China has twice received WHO expert groups which have issued reports on their findings, which lays a solid basis for the global origin-tracing work.

It is necessary for the WHO to do the origin-tracing in a fair, objective, and transparent way. By politicizing and weaponizing origin tracing, the US is only curbing global cooperation that might help prevent a future pandemic.