Hopefully, Washington’s COVID-19 origin-tracing farce is finally over

US President Joe Biden’s action plan for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan is widely seen as a disaster causing chaos and creating a humanitarian crisis. The US military intelligence community’s capabilities and effectiveness are once again seriously questioned as it was completely overconfident on the drive and determination of the Afghan forces to fight the Taliban. Instead of holding the fort for 90 days, or even longer, the Afghan government collapsed in nine days.

READ MORE: World urges objective COVID origin tracing

This is not the only instance that the Biden administration seriously misjudged. Biden’s high-profile decision to order the 90-day intelligence community investigations into SAR-CoV-2 origin tracing is another example. As expected, the report does not produce the conclusions his administration wants. Facts cannot be fabricated. They speak for themselves.

Hiding behind the umbrella of national security, the full report has been classified. Only a summary is published. It lacks transparency, and the public is kept in the dark on the sources, and amount and confidence level of the data collected, studied and analyzed. Only vague conclusions were announced without any reasons given to support its findings. The end result is that “we are not sure”, putting the blame on “insufficient data” from Chinese authorities. Interestingly, intelligence agencies are divided on whether the pandemic began with a natural exposure or a lab leak. This is not surprising at all because origin tracing is an art of medical science, not intelligence gathering and guessing. Thorough investigations must be conducted by medical experts and reputable international organizations such as the World Health Organization, but not by intelligence agencies with predetermined political objectives.

If the Biden administration is still keen on origin tracing, they should now invite the WHO to embark on a study on these unknown pneumonia cases and the experiments undertaken in the fort with the highest degree of transparency and cooperation

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The fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s proximity to the wet market where the virus was first discovered is being used as an excuse to politicize the pandemic and stigmatize China with a full-blown campaign is ridiculous. If this can be justified, how about the mysterious closure of Fort Detrick, home to the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in August 2019 due to safety concerns? Up to now, the relevant US authorities still refuse to provide any further information on grounds of “national security”. However, do not forget that two months later, in October 2019, 3,000-plus strange pneumonia cases were reported in Frederick County, Maryland, where the fort is located. Growing new evidence is emerging that the virus appeared in Europe before the Wuhan outbreak. In United States, the mayor of Belleville, New Jersey, said that he contracted the disease in November 2019. If the Biden administration is still keen on origin tracing, they should now invite the WHO to embark on a study on these unknown pneumonia cases and the experiments undertaken in the fort with the highest degree of transparency and cooperation. Only by setting this example can the Biden administration assure the world that they come with clean hands.

The author is a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and is executive vice-chairman of the New People’s Party.