COVID-19 || China Responds To Accusations Against Wuhan: "The Virus Came From A Laboratory ... From The US"

Crossing of accusations between Beijing and Washington after Biden's announcement to put his espionage to work to discover the origin of the virus.

New chapter of the epidemiological puzzle. Washington has taken the hard line towards Beijing over the origins of the coronavirus and calls for new studies on when, where and how the pandemic began. And, most importantly: he has managed to resurrect the theory of an accident in the Wuhan laboratory. A theory that has once again moved away from conspiratorial terrain to become a powerful hypothesis within the United States.

Bats remain the prime candidates for being the original hosts for SARS-CoV-2, but the intermediate host before the coronavirus was transmitted to humans is unknown. It is also unclear when it started to spread or from where.

Read more: the coronavirus would leave a research center in Wuhan

More than three and a half million deaths later, there are still more questions than answers. And politics once again cross the path of science. President Joe Biden said Wednesday that he had ordered US intelligence agencies to find out the origins of the pandemic within 90 days. This has angered China because echoes of whether the virus could have escaped from its Wuhan laboratory have been awakened.

Beijing, which put all possible stones in the way of an independent search in Wuhan at the beginning of the pandemic, continues with its script to try to erase its trace at the origin: it asks that the scrutiny be directed to other countries. Repeat that idea over and over. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) is preparing to begin a second phase of investigations with the two world powers marking opposing positions on how to trace the origins of the virus.

The starting point, at least until proven otherwise, remains the city of Wuhan. And the P4 laboratory, the highest level of biosafety because it studies the most contagious pathogens, continues to be at the center of all the controversies and the dialectical war between Washington and Beijing.

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We must go back to February of last year to rescue the first statements of Donald Trump talking about the "Chinese virus" and pointing to the lab. He promptly received responses from China. Much noise was made by the statements of Zhao Lijian, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, hinting that American soldiers were the ones who brought the virus to Wuhan taking advantage of the celebration of the Military World Games. 9,693 athletes from 110 countries attended that then unknown and nebulous city in the center of the Asian giant. It was the first time that these games were organized outside the military bases; the first time all competitions were held within a city. Even, unlike previous editions, the athletes stayed in an Olympic Village, accompanied by more than 26,000 volunteers who met their needs.

Zhao fueled his theory in April by sharing it on Twitter. To many it seemed like a response to President Trump's constant attacks. Later it would be the respected pulmonologist and chairman of the Chinese Health Commission, Zhong Nanshan, who would give a push to Zhao's dart, noting that there was " the possibility that the source of the virus was not in China."

LABS, CONSPIRACIES AND GUILT

The conspiracy theory deeply penetrated the Asian giant, its people and its media. "The United States is urged to release information on the health of military athletes who came to Wuhan in October 2019," read a March 2020 headline in the Global Times newspaper , one of the Communist Party's most aggressive media tentacles. A couple of weeks earlier, that newspaper had published a story about five athletes who were admitted to a hospital during the Games and were quarantined. "They were infected with malaria, not with Covid-19," they clarified. But the March article did fuel an alleged investigation by an American journalist who had singled out a US military athlete as "patient zero."

Read more: The World Health Organization report

Indeed, the Global Times yesterday published an editorial saying that if the "laboratory leak theory" is further investigated, the United States should also allow researchers to enter its own scientific facilities. This newspaper, always under the supervision of the Chinese authorities, returned to rescue another old theory: the origin of the coronavirus could be in the biological laboratory of Fort Detrick, in Maryland.

The Chinese embassy in Washington also spoke out on Thursday, assuring in a statement that "some political forces have become obsessed with manipulation and the blame game ." They ensure that China supports "a comprehensive study of all the first cases of Covid-10 found around the world and a comprehensive investigation of some secret bases and biological laboratories around the world."

THE ZERO PATIENT

Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Global Times, has charged in his Thursday article directly against Anthony Fauci , America's leading infectious disease expert, who made a statement on May 11 saying that he was not fully convinced that Covid-19 is develop naturally and that he believed that more research is needed on its origin. "The American elites further degenerate into morality, and Fauci is one of them," Hu writes in his article, which accuses Fauci of "stoking a big lie against China by promoting the theory that the coronavirus leaked from a laboratory of Wuhan".

Fauci's comments were followed by an exclusive from the Wall Street Journal, citing a US intelligence report that said three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in November 2019 with Covid symptoms and went to hospital.

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If we take a look at the WHO website, based on information reported from China, the first confirmed case of Covid-19 dates from December 8 in Wuhan. Although the first infected person recognized by the authorities is a 57-year-old woman named Wei Guixian, who ran a shrimp stall at the Huanan seafood and wildlife market , designated as the place where the outbreak arose. Wei began showing symptoms on December 10. Six days later, he was admitted to the hospital for an "unknown illness," the doctors said.

So far, the only investigation on the ground (Wuhan) was conducted in January by an international team of WHO scientists. A couple of months later, they released a 120-page report co-authored by 17 WHO experts and 17 Chinese scientists. The prevailing theory held: The virus originated in bats, jumped onto another animal, and mutated in a way that later allowed it to be transmitted from human to human. One of the highlights of the report was the consideration that "introduction through a laboratory incident was an extremely unlikely avenue".

A statement that was seized on in China to insist that the origin of the pandemic should be investigated in other countries. "According to clues, reports and investigations, the COVID-19 pandemic was detected in various parts of the world in the early second half of 2019," spokesman Zhao Lijian said yesterday. "With more evidence of early cases emerging in other countries, including the US, Spain, Italy, France, Brazil and India, some even earlier than the cases reported in Wuhan, several prominent Chinese public health experts have called on the WHO to follow the evidence and conduct global field studies in the coming months."

But from Washington they continue to pressure the WHO not to remove from Wuhan the main focus of a second investigation. In the US they doubt that the international health organization has the capacity to carry out an investigation without falling under pressure from Beijing. A critique of the WHO that the current Biden administration has inherited from the previous Trump administration.

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"We have been saying that for a long time China needed to provide more access to the laboratory , cooperate more fully with scientific researchers, and we do not believe they have met that standard," Karine Jean-Pierre, deputy press secretary of the House, said Wednesday. White. Andy Slavitt, the White House's senior adviser on Covid-19, also said this week that the United States needed a "completely transparent process from China. We need the WHO to help on that matter. We don't feel like we have it now."