Image source,Getty Images
According to US media reports, the report on the origin of the new crown virus submitted by US President Joe Biden (Joe Biden) asked the country’s intelligence agencies to submit within 90 days will not have a clear conclusion.
According to the report, intelligence agencies are divided as to whether the virus originally discovered in China was naturally transmitted from animals to humans or caused by a laboratory accident.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki previously stated that the investigation will be completed by the deadline on Tuesday (August 24), but it will take “a few days” to sort out a non-confidential version for the public.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi described the report as a “planting” of China. Beijing stated that the report of the U.S. intelligence agency was not a “scientific report based on facts and scientific methods,” but was meant to “shirk responsibility for the failure of the United States in its own fight against the epidemic and blame China.”
At the same time, experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) studying the origin of the virus warned on Wednesday (August 25) that the current traceability work has “stalled” and further delays in the traceability investigation may lead to the loss of key evidence about the origin of the epidemic.
“There is no clear conclusion”
The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday (August 25) quoted two senior U.S. officials as saying that intelligence agencies did not reach a clear conclusion on the origin of the virus, “partly because of the lack of detailed information from China.”
“This is a deep excavation, but under the current situation, we can only dig deep into this,” a US official said. “If China does not allow certain data, you will never really know the answer.”
The new crown epidemic first broke out in Wuhan in central China at the beginning of 2020. It has now claimed more than 4 million lives worldwide. However, how the virus can infect humans and why it can suddenly spread from person to person on a large scale. When animals are spread to people, there is still no answer to the question of what the potential host is.
Image source,Reuters
The South China Seafood Market in Wuhan was initially considered to be the earliest place where the epidemic broke out, but the scientists subsequently changed their conclusions.
The 13-member WHO new crown virus traceability expert team arrived in Wuhan in January this year, met with Chinese scientists, and visited a number of institutions, including several infectious disease hospitals, South China Seafood Market and Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has conducted research on bat coronaviruses for more than ten years.
Subsequently, the expert group issued a report, and concluded that the new coronavirus is likely to be transmitted from animals sold on the market, and the statement leaked from the laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is “extremely unlikely.”
But many scientists still call for more investigations into the theory of laboratory leaks. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also said that it should not be prematurely determined whether the virus is involved in laboratory leaks.
The Wall Street Journal cited an intelligence report in May this year that several researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in November 2019. This incident, coupled with China’s refusal to investigate the laboratory leak by the WHO, prompted Biden to make this decision.
But in June of this year, Avril Haines, the US Director of National Intelligence, played down the possibility of drawing conclusions. She told Yahoo News: “We hope to find hard evidence, but this may not happen.”
Image source,Reuters
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has always been at the center of the storm of public opinion at the source of the virus.
According to the New York Times, current and former US officials have repeatedly warned that finding the exact origin of the new crown pandemic may be the work of scientists, not spies. Officials also warned that the 90-day investigation may be too brief to draw any clear conclusions.
Reuters quoted a U.S. official as saying that the report may point out more investigative methods that U.S. officials can take, including making demands on China. But at a time when Sino-US relations are at a low point in decades, demands on China may further exacerbate tensions between the two countries.
The report also said that people familiar with the intelligence report said that in recent months, there has been little evidence that the virus has spread naturally in wild animals.
China strikes back
On the eve of the release of the traceability report in the United States, China is stepping up efforts to advocate another laboratory leak theory-the virus originated in Fort Detrick in the US military. The facility was once the center of the US biological weapons program and currently houses a biomedical laboratory to study viruses including Ebola and smallpox.
The Global Times, an official tabloid known for its nationalism, launched a public joint signature on the Internet calling on Chinese netizens to ask the WHO to investigate Fort Detrick. Participating netizens only need to click the mouse to “sign”. It is said that the joint letter has received more than 25 million “signatures.”
Image source,Getty Images
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin mentioned the matter again on Wednesday (August 25), saying that the United States should first invite WHO experts to investigate Fort Detrick. He in turn accused the United States of saying that the timeline of the outbreak in the United States has been advancing, but the United States itself “shunned and kept secret.”
“Such a planted report and political report naturally cannot draw any scientific conclusions on the source of the virus, and will only cause interference and damage to international traceability and global anti-epidemic cooperation,” he said.
The Chinese Embassy in the United States also published an article on its official website on the same day under the title of “Supporting Scientific Traceability and Opposing Political Viruses.” The preface of the article stated that the Chinese Embassy recently submitted this article to a number of American media to explain China’s position, but all were rejected.
“You can accuse others without evidence, but don’t give others a chance to defend. Is this the’freedom of the press and speech’ in the United States?” the article wrote.
Traceability bottleneck
When the U.S. and China are tit-for-tat on the traceability of the new coronavirus, scientists warn that the window for the feasibility of conducting critical research on the origin of the epidemic is rapidly closing. Experts from the WHO Traceability Group said on Wednesday (August 25) that the current investigation has been “stalled.”
In an article in the scientific journal Nature, they called on political and scientific leaders to speed up these studies “while there is still time.” Experts say that further delays may make key research “biologically impossible” to complete.
At present, most scientists still believe that the transmission of the new coronavirus to humans through animals is the most likely scenario.
In its March report, the WHO expert team suggested that blood banks in China and other countries should look for virus antibodies in blood samples a few months before the outbreak in December 2019, and extract samples from wild animals such as minks. , To determine whether it may be an intermediate host.
However, due to the limited life span of farmed animals, and the blood bank stores donated blood for a fixed period of time, researchers worry that valuable biological information may have been lost.
Image source,Getty Images
The new coronavirus has been circulating around the world for more than one and a half years.
Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, a member of the WHO traceability expert group who had traveled to Wuhan to investigate, told the BBC that the question of whether the virus leaked from the laboratory is quite politically controversial and has also changed work. It’s more difficult.
In July of this year, China made it clear that it rejected the second-stage investigation plan for the traceability of the new crown proposed by the WHO. Chinese officials said that the second phase of WHO’s plan to focus on “China’s violation of laboratory procedures causing virus leakage” as one of the research priorities, revealing the plan’s “disrespect for common sense and scientific arrogance.”
“If we are talking about an accident in a laboratory, the exact same virus must still be in the laboratory before it can be accidentally released,” Koopmans said. “We didn’t find any signs.”
But some other scientists wanted to check the virus database held by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was closed on September 12, 2019.
“In retrospect, the clear wording’extremely impossible’ may not be the most sensible way of expressing it, because it has become the core of the debate,” Koopmans said. “But given everything we know, it’s about what you will prioritize (in the next scientific step).”
At a press conference on Wednesday, Michael Ryan, the head of the World Health Organization’s emergency project, euphemistically criticized China for peddling the origins of Fort Detrick in the United States.
“If a Chinese colleague said that the hypothesis of laboratory leakage is unfounded in the Chinese context, and we now need to go to a laboratory in another country to investigate the leakage there, it would be a little bit contradictory,” Ruian said.