Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said Tuedsay on Twitter they recognize the responsible and transparent contribution of China against the pandemic.

"Cuba calls on the international community to strengthen cooperation and solidarity,” he said.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has said they support China's principled position on origin-tracing.

He made the remarks when holding the third strategic dialogue between China and Pakistan with Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Chengdu on July 24.

"It is a very important area of study establishing this origin, but it takes time, and needs to really weigh up all the evidence," said Stephen Winchester, a consultant virologist at Berkshire and Surrey Pathology Services in the UK.

"The more understanding and knowledge of these variants (we have), the more we know about how these epidemics could occur... it's all useful evidence," he said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

Outbreaks will only worsen if countries "do not contribute to the research and development of new public health policies," said Elena Reyes Rueda, a public health specialist from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Origin-tracing is a complex scientific undertaking, so there should be more collaboration between governments to successfully identify the virus' hosts and the routes of transmission, she said in a video call with Xinhua.

NAIROBI - The study on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic should be undertaken in multiple countries in order to achieve outcomes that are balanced and devoid of partisan finger-pointing, a Kenyan journalist has said.

Eric Biegon, a multimedia journalist with Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC), said that any scientific study on the origin of the virus should not be restricted to a single country or territory.

"Tracing the origin, yes, it is important, for a better future response to pandemics," Biegon said in a commentary published on KBC website on Aug. 4.

"But to avoid being seen as a mission against one nation or region, scientists should be allowed to get to the bottom of this, and the net should be cast wider with probes being undertaken in multiple locations," he added.

Biegon noted that some industrial powers like the United States are lobbying the global health agency to begin a second probe in China despite China's openness to the initial probe that debunked the laboratory leakage theory.

He stressed that Beijing is not opposed to COVID-19 origin tracing and has maintained that such a process must be guided by science and objectivity.

China is right by insisting the probe should be global as evidence emerged that the virus could have been circulating in other countries long before it was detected in the world's second largest economy, Biegon said.

He noted that restricting the virus origin probe in China will be counterproductive at a time when global solidarity is required to fight the pandemic through greater access to vaccines.

"In fact the more the world engages in back and forth over what might have given rise to the virus, many more lives are being put in danger," said Biegon.

He questioned the motivation behind the call for a fresh probe into the virus origin in China, alluding to geopolitics while stressing the need for science to take center stage in the whole debate.

Biegon hailed China for rallying behind global fight against the pandemic through donation of vaccines and other essential medical supplies while rich Western nations take a back seat.

He stressed that the finding of a previous study suggesting that the virus could have been circulating in Europe in as early as September 2019 should not be dismissed.

According to Biegon, the misinformation about the virus origin perpetuated by Western powers could undermine its containment amid emergence of highly contagious strains.

He added the petition by Chinese citizens for a probe into activities of the US Fort Detrick biological laboratory was justified since it might unmask a possible link to the virus origin.

A research report, "'America Ranked First'?! The Truth about America's Fight against COVID-19", was jointly released by three Chinese think tanks in Beijing on Monday.

William Jones, Washington Bureau Chief for the Executive Intelligence Review, attributed the failure to contain the virus spread in the US to the continuous politicization of the pandemic since President Joe Biden took office in January, despite making epidemic prevention and control a priority.

In contrast to China's distribution of millions of vaccine doses worldwide, the Biden administration boasted that the US, not China, would become the main distributor of vaccines globally, working overtime in order to catch up, which they still have not done, Jones noted.

A research report, "'America Ranked First'?! The Truth about America's Fight against COVID-19", was jointly released by three Chinese think tanks in Beijing on Monday.

Martin Jacques, a former senior fellow at Cambridge University, said at a seminar where the report was released that the "attack on China" is a strategy of distraction and deflection aimed at tarnishing China's reputation to the greatest degree, and to distract from the poor US performance.

"COVID-19 is mired in a sort of Cold War rhetoric, Cold War language, and Cold War assault by the US, and this is going to continue," Jacques said via video link.

BEIJING - There is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus behind the COVID-19 pandemic, was created in a lab, and none of the lab leak claims "hold up to scientific scrutiny", a virologist with the University of Glasgow has said.

The lab leak theory "offers no evidence other than the circumstantial location of the Wuhan Institute of Virology", which is located in Wuhan, central China's Hubei province, David Robertson, head of viral genomics and bioinformatics of the Scottish university, told Xinhua in an email interview recently.

"Currently, all of the data points strongly in one direction, and that's toward a natural virus, not one created in a lab," Robertson said. "We need to trust in the evidence and the experts who have experience of virus evolution and emergence."

The virologist also said it is "far too divergent" for RaTG13, a coronavirus detected in horseshoe bats in southwest China's Yunnan province in 2013, to be the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 that caused the first human cases, as the two viruses differ in about 1,100 nucleotide positions.

"That the closest bat viruses to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan is misleading as there's a massive under-sampling issue and although these bat viruses are genetically close this still represents decades of time," argued Robertson, stressing that there are "a lot of these types of viruses circulating in nature".

Robertson pointed out that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 looks very similar to the first SARS emergence, with genetic relatedness to viruses found in horseshoe bats and a strong association with animal markets. "We just haven't as yet identified the intermediate animal species for SARS-CoV-2 that facilitated the transmission from bats to humans," he added.

Robertson was among 21 eminent scientists from universities and research institutes around the world who have warned that a focus on a highly improbable lab origin of COVID-19 is distracting from scientific tasks to comprehensively investigate the zoonotic origin.

The scientists, in a review paper on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 published in July as a pre-print on Zenodo, an open-access repository, wrote that there currently exists zero evidence that the virus originated from a lab and that "there is no evidence that any early cases had any connection to the Wuhan Institute of Virology".

Commenting on the renewed interest on the lab leak theory in the United States over the past few months, he said "it's really hard to understand how this happened, there was no new data presented".

"I'd say the main one is it stops being science anymore," Robertson noted. "Science at its core can't be about opinion, it has to (be) evidence based."

For more than a year, the United States response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a miserable failure, both nationally and internationally, said a report released on Monday.

The report, "'America Ranked First'?! The Truth about America's Fight against COVID-19", said the US has not only disrupted global efforts to fight the coronavirus, but also cast US citizens into a deepening "crisis", with the country now facing a fourth wave of infections and a new high in confirmed cases.

While the world has raced to strengthen international vaccine cooperation and promote their fair and equitable distribution, the US has engaged in "vaccine nationalism" and made it more difficult for developing countries to obtain vaccines, the report said, noting that it has exported less than 1 percent of US-made vaccines.

Months of COVID-19 vaccine hoarding in the US also led to enormous vaccine wastage as domestic demand declined. Doses that could have vaccinated at least 13 million people were in danger of expiring in the US, The Washington Post reported on July 27.

In addition, the US government has disrupted international anti-pandemic efforts by politicizing the origin tracing of the virus, "coercing the World Health Organization and some scientists to give up their objective and impartial positions", according to the report jointly released in Beijing by three think tanks: the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, Taihe Institute and Intellisia Institute.

Washington has targeted China on the issue of virus origin tracing. US President Joe Biden recently ordered an official investigation into the possibility of an origin link between the novel coronavirus and a laboratory in China's Wuhan.

Martin Jacques, a former senior fellow at Cambridge University, said at a seminar where the report was released that the "attack on China" is a strategy of distraction and deflection aimed at tarnishing China's reputation to the greatest degree, and to distract from the poor US performance.

"COVID-19 is mired in a sort of Cold War rhetoric, Cold War language, and Cold War assault by the US, and this is going to continue," Jacques said via video link.

The US government has failed to take effective exit control measures, which the report said has "indirectly exacerbated the global spread of the pandemic".

When the US was facing its peak of the pandemic, the number of US citizens traveling abroad also peaked.

From November 2020 to January 2021, as the average daily confirmed cases exceeded 186,000, the average daily number of US citizens traveling abroad reached the peak of 87,000, according to official figures.

The US government also was "exporting the virus" by returning thousands of illegal immigrants to developing countries that were not equipped to deal with it, intensifying COVID-19 deterioration in those countries.

Tang Bei, an international relations researcher at Shanghai International Studies University, said the US is prone to attributing health threats to foreign countries, especially developing countries, thus ignoring the problems within its own borders.

With the US recorded its highest daily case loads over six months, its poor performance in dealing with COVID-19 cast its own people into a crisis.

According to Johns Hopkins University, the US has had the most COVID-19 infections of any country, with more than 35.7 million confirmed cases and more than 616,000 deaths as of Monday.

A growing partisan divide is seen as the main reason behind the poor US COVID-19 response at home, the report said, adding that it presented the image of a "Disunited America" in the fight against the pandemic.

"What will save lives is science, solutions and solidarity," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said.

If the US can stop its blame game and join with China in epidemic prevention, it will be much easier to fill the inoculation gap between developed and less-developed countries, helping to tame the pandemic at an earlier date.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, speaking on US cable TV last week, said investigations into the origins of COVID-19, which have become highly controversial among scientists and fuelled tension between China and the US and Australia, would not change "the need for masks and vaccines", according to a report by The Australian.

CAIRO - The World Health Organization (WHO)'s proposal, under the pressure of the United States, to conduct a second-phase COVID-19 origin tracing in China is politicized, a former Egyptian diplomat has said.

China has already received a WHO delegation which stayed for a long time to study the virus origin and concluded in a report that the lab leak theory was "extremely unlikely," said Ali el-Hefny, Egypt's former ambassador to China and former deputy foreign minister, in a recent interview with Xinhua.

China has also facilitated the scientists' meetings and field visits during the research, said the former Egyptian diplomat.

By pressing for a second round of origin tracing, the Western countries aim to stir up confusion and doubts about China's transparency, el-Hefny said.

They are attempting to hinder the development of the world's second largest economy, he said.

The former diplomat also voiced his support for the Chinese netizens who signed an open letter to the WHO, asking the organization to list the Fort Detrick laboratory in the United States as a focus of the next phase of the origin-tracing work.

He also noted that politicizing critical issues is a disease that has been afflicting the world for a long time. "Anybody can realize that the West has always employed human rights and democracy as ways to suppress countries opposing their agendas."

"Achieving their interests via giving a political tone to many issues and crises, that's the plan," he said, adding that it's a shame to politicize the virus crisis when it comes to human lives.

LONDON - People should be patient, deliberating and consider all the evidence in terms of COVID-19 origin-tracing, a British expert has told Xinhua in a recent interview.

Dr. Stephen Winchester, consultant virologist at Berkshire and Surrey Pathology Services, cited previous epidemics as an example. "If you look at the epidemic with the SARS-CoV-1, it took over a decade to really get a full understanding of the origins," he said. "So it gives you an idea of the timescale it actually takes to fully understand the origins of these epidemics."

The origin of the virus can only be determined by results of impartial scientific investigations, Winchester noted. "It is so critical that science can act impartially ... because ultimately, we are trying to get a better understanding of the outbreak, while simultaneously trying to get a better handle on the outbreak," he said.

"So it is a very important area of study establishing this origin, but it takes time, and needs to really weigh up all the evidence."

"Opinions and theories are just that often, but they are opinions and theories, they are not necessarily aligned with the main body of evidence," said Winchester, referring to a group of Internet activists who promote the lab leak theory while their research was done without scientific approaches and not based on scientific evidence.

A global disease requires a global understanding, while more international collaboration could accelerate the origin-tracing process, said the virologist.

When asked about whether the emerging new variants of COVID-19 would make origin-tracing more difficult, Winchester said that "observing the emergence of those new variants in real time actually enhances our understanding of the virus and its potential evolution."

"The more understanding and knowledge of these variants (we have), the more we know about how these epidemics could occur ... it's all useful evidence," he said.

The specialist shared the broad consensus of the international scientific and medical community in agreeing with the conclusion of a World Health Organization-China joint study, which found it "extremely unlikely" that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory, as the US government has claimed.

MEXICO CITY - Political interests should not interfere with efforts to uncover the origins of COVID-19, valuable work which could help prevent future epidemics, an epidemiologist has said.

In a video call with Xinhua, public health specialist Elena Reyes Rueda criticized "petty" interests that politicize the issue to discredit China.

"China has made great contributions to research in epidemiology, viruses and genetics, and I think it has done well to the best of its ability," said Reyes.

Unfortunately, there have been acts of "politicization, discrimination-seeking, and of making China appear as if it is not collaborating," she noted, warning of political biases and disinformation, which obstructs the fight against the pandemic.

The enemy is the virus, which is not about "race, color, sex, or nationality," and the outbreaks will only worsen if countries "do not contribute to the research and development of new public health policies," said Reyes.

The specialist from the National Autonomous University of Mexico shared the broad consensus of the international scientific and medical community in agreeing with the conclusion of a World Health Organization-China joint study, which found it "extremely unlikely" that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory, as the US government has claimed.

Furthermore, China was one of the first countries to cooperate with the WHO in investigating the origins of the virus, she said.

"China's show of support for other countries is noteworthy ... it is important to mention that China is one of the countries that has invested the most in technological and biotechnological research," she said.

Origin-tracing is a complex scientific undertaking, so there should be more collaboration between governments to successfully identify the virus' hosts and the routes of transmission, she added.

"Tracing will allow us to learn more about viruses and how they resist environmental changes," the expert said.

While COVID-19 took all governments by surprise and exposed the weaknesses of healthcare systems in most countries, it was "a window of opportunity" for research and development of new methodologies that can better prevent future outbreaks and protect human health, she said.

Reyes, who has been studying COVID-19 for more than a year, participated in Mexico's investigation into the origin of the H1N1 flu virus, which emerged in 2009.

An online petition initiated by Chinese internet users for a thorough investigation of a biological laboratory at Fort Detrick in the United States concluded on Friday, garnering 25 million signatures in just three weeks.

The petition, which a group of Chinese internet users drafted and entrusted the Global Times to post on social media, was launched on July 17 and received 500,000 signatures in 24 hours and 1 million in 48 hours. It concluded at midnight on Friday Beijing time.

The investigation should look at the origins of COVID-19 as related to the Maryland laboratory as well as the laboratory's safety, the organizers said.

Dangerous infectious viruses are stored at Fort Detrick, 80 kilometers northwest of Washington, and there was a leak there in 2019, just before the pandemic broke out, the Global Times said.

As the number of signatories to the petition neared 10 million, the website was subjected to severe cyberattacks whose origins were IP addresses in the US, the newspaper said.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on July 26 that the US needs to explain why it remains silent on opening the Fort Detrick laboratory to an investigation and why it launched cyberattacks on the website housing the petition, which calls for the World Health Organization to investigate the laboratory's activities.

A Weibo user said: "China won't take the blame and be the scapegoat for the US' egregious mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The US has the most confirmed cases and deaths in the world, yet it has barely done anything good to the international community in fighting the pandemic."

Another Weibo user, dorelaK, said investigating only one US biological laboratory is insufficient, calling for that all such laboratories, of which there are more than 200 worldwide, to be investigated.

On Thursday a group of Filipino academics, along with Herman Laurel, a political commentator, launched an online petition similar to the Chinese one calling for "the wall of silence" to be broken regarding Fort Detrick.

The campaign, which has amassed hundreds of signatures, also calls on "certain countries" to stop politicizing COVID-19.

Calling on the WHO to investigate Fort Detrick, Laurel, a columnist for the social news website Sovereign PH, said the laboratory "suffered a laboratory incident in July 2019, causing the US Centers for Disease Control to shut down the facility (the following month) due to 'serious safety violations'".

Xinhua contributed to this story.

The Western mainstream media should stop shifting focus from their countries' own problems by sensationalizing the "Wuhan lab leak theory", a US writer told China Daily in a recent interview at a forum held by the Center for China and Globalization.

"This is very, very dangerous time. And in terms of the motivation for what we see with, I think, Western mainstream media, they keep focusing back to China in their interest and desire to blame China," Mario Cavolo, also a nonresident senior fellow of the Center for China and Globalization, told China Daily reporter Pan Yixuan.

Cavolo said the "Wuhan lab leak theory" is an example of information being broadly and aggressively disseminated in Western mainstream media.

Cavolo mentioned the World Health Organization did a thorough investigation that dismissed the theory and that scientific research institutions including the US National Institutes of Health had evidence that the novel coronavirus existed in other countries earlier than when the virus was identified in Wuhan.

Cavolo also pointed out that scientists around the world are cooperating to counter COVID-19 and that China needs to improve its narratives to blunt such rhetoric.

Governments, politicians and media outlets have called for a science-based approach to tracing the origins of the coronavirus while speaking out against the politicization of the issue.

"We very much rely on the scientific evidence and there needed to be a further investigation ... our position remains the same as it was," said New Zealand Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta in an interview with Radio New Zealand (RNZ) on July 23.

Pandemic conspiracy theories dismiss science in favor of some extreme, outlandish claims, wrote Ahmed Mahdi in an article titled "Vaccination Conspiracy Theories: The Goofy, the Sad, and the Useful".

The "goofy" conspiracy theories lack solid scientific evidence, but could mislead those who believe in them and mislead society in general, said Mahdi, a political science lecturer at the British University in Egypt.

The article was recently published by Al-Ahram Weekly, a popular weekly English version of Egypt's state-run Al-Ahram newspaper.

Identifying the source of COVID-19 is instrumental in understanding what to expect in the future, but the process must be scientifically rigorous, said South African epidemiologist Salim Abdool Karim in a recent interview with Chinese media.

"We need all those authorities, including those in China, to cooperate," he added during an interview on Chinese broadcaster Phoenix TV on July 19.