Politicizing COVID-19 origin tracing could have devastating effects on the global fight against the pandemic.
The question of whether there could be a leak of a dangerous virus from the laboratory in Wuhan "is more political in nature," said Didier Pittet, lead infectious diseases expert at Geneva University Hospitals and inventor of the hand sanitizer.
Gerardo Lopez Perez, a Mexican epidemiologist, said the United States now again raises the issue of origin tracing mainly out of self-interests.
Researchers give short shrift to politically motivated theories on COVID-19 origin
Amid growing calls for Fort Detrick investigation, a foreign affairs expert at a prominent US university says 'that's where all the toxins are' in a recent interview with Xinhua.
It's not the first time for the US intelligence community to lie. In 2003, the CIA accused Iraq of creating weapons of mass destruction and ignited flames of war in that country. What followed were numerous deaths of civilians and collapses of families. However, facts proved that the so-called intelligence was cooked up by the US, and the “proof” was merely a vial of detergent.
"The US politicization of the virus and the WHO has simply continued, with the theatrics of the Wuhan lab-leak conspiracy theory and speculation about the origin of the virus gaining new life ... as part of the ongoing American hostility against China," British writer Tom Fowdy wrote in an article published by RT.
More than 20 million people have signed an online letter to the World Health Organization demanding a thorough investigation into a secretive United States laboratory tainted by a poor safety record in order to gain a better understanding of the origins of the coronavirus.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian has called on the US to respond to the appeal of the Chinese netizens, and allow experts from the WHO to conduct investigations into the origin of the novel coronavirus in the US, including in the Fort Detrick lab.
More international voices call for fair, objective COVID origin investigation
"I concur with the many scientists who say that politicizing the science does not help genuine efforts to identify the origins of SARS-CoV-2, or ongoing collaboration between Chinese and Western scientists," said Hume Field, a science and policy advisor for China and Southeast Asia at EcoHealth Alliance in New York.
The novel coronavirus comes from nature, and accusations claiming a Chinese lab was the source of the pandemic are contrary to science itself, said Alexander Semyonov, head of the Yekaterinburg branch of the State Research Center of the Virology and Biotechnology Vector Institute.
Editor's note: While scientists around the world are working together to trace the origin of coronavirus to understand more about the disease, some media outlets hyped up the so-called lab leak theory. Uninformed voices supporting coronavirus lab-leak theory lack evidence and hinder global efforts to trace the origin of the virus, says Dr. Xiaowei Jiang, a biologist from Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in an interview with CGTN anchor Wang Guan.
China has adhered to the principles of openness, transparency and cooperation from the very beginning in investigating the origins of the coronavirus, and has twice invited experts from the World Health Organization to visit China in support of this task, said Zhang Hanhui, the Chinese ambassador to Russia.
"There's no real reason to put any weight on the possibility of a lab leak right now. We've got nothing that points to the lab other than suspicion and innuendo based on the idea of not trusting China," said Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
"Based on nearly all emerging human viruses of the last 50 years (including SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012), animals are the likely source," said Dominic Dwyer, an Australian medical virologist in the World Health Organization's COVID-19 origin-tracing joint study with China. "By virtue of their ecology, bats play a special role, not just with coronaviruses, but with Ebola, Hendra and others," said the virologist in an op-ed published in The Guardian on June 18.
The United States is playing its old trick of smearing China, after China rejected the WHO's plan for a second phase of a study into the origin of the coronavirus.
The real issue about COVID-19 origins is how to prevent future pandemics based on international cooperation, instead of blaming or acquitting some countries, said Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.