Politicizing virus probe blow to efforts

WASHINGTON－The investigation into the origins of COVID-19 should be dealt with solely by scientists, and any politicization damages global collaboration in the fight against the pandemic, a US scholar says.

"The (COVID) origins inquiry …should be left to the scientists to do, and it will take time to come to a conclusion on that," said Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies in Washington.

"But a lot of the evidence will be hard to sift through if it is not done during the early stages," he said of an investigation by United States intelligence services of the origins of the virus. "So there should not be any interruptions, and this sort of political raking up of issues stalls the issues at the scientists."

US intelligence services reached an inconclusive assessment about the origins of the virus following a 90-day investigation ordered by US President Joe Biden, according to an unclassified summary of the investigation issued on Friday.

The report "tends to give an equivalence to all the various theories", Gupta said, and is "in my view very unfair", and will be remembered as "something negative".

By doing this, the US is "trying to maintain those two big narratives "as it first proposed that China was not transparent about the origins of the virus and was not quick enough to deal with and inform the world about the virus, Gupta said.

"The whole purpose is to blacken China on COVID-19 in some way. And that is how it has played out in the US media, with political leaders giving oxygen to this argument, and considering the power of Western media that will de facto hover above us in some way, shape or form, even down the line.

"They will try to stick that in our images, in our head. And so that itself is a challenge for China to deal with considering the power of the Western media."

'Whole-scale route'

Unfortunately there has been "so much politics" with regard to the fight against COVID-19 starting from questions about its origins to masks and vaccination, he said.

"Now what we are in fact having is a lack of political will to actually come together to deal with COVID-19. And the origins issue has hurt the political space to cooperate at a multilateral level and to deepen multilateral cooperation on global public health.

"We should have been thinking of a whole-scale route and brand-changing in how global public health is dealt with at the multilateral level. There has just not been that political foundation and political momentum to do it because so much of it has been spent in bickering about origins from a very politicized angle," he said.

"I think in the long run that will hurt us as a global community of not being able to create that institutional infrastructure to tackle these sorts of pandemics in the future.

"There will be many more of these, and we know the extent of the damage it has created, not just in terms of human life, but also in terms of economic dislocation.… That is why any politicization of this issue is deeply regretted," Gupta said.

"I think the origins inquiry, which will take time, must be allowed to proceed on its own steam." The task "has been dealt with by scientists and should be dealt with solely by scientists". The way China has responded to the pandemic is "incredibly commendable", he said.

The response "has preserved human life, and I think it will, in the longer run, be a case study of how you deal with viruses".

Xinhua