New Delhi | Jagran World Desk: In a strong warning to China on its alleged reluctance to determine COVID-19 origins, the US cautioned Beijing that China will risk international isolation if it does not allow a “real investigation” into the origins of the pandemic. This comes a week after US President Joe Biden called for a probe into virus origins at the G-7 leaders’ summit in Cornwall, UK.
“They (Chinese) have a stark choice: either they will allow, in a responsible way, investigators to do the real work of figuring out where this (virus) came from, or they will face isolation in the international community,” the US National Security Adviser (NSA) Jake Sullivan said in an interview to Fox News . Sullivan added that the US is determined to “get to the bottom of how this virus came into the world and who has accountability for that”.
In another statement given to CNN on the same day, Sullivan said that the US is in the process of using its own capacities to begin to develop a clear picture. Sullivan added that to build an international consensus on something as pressing as virus origins take “diplomatic spadework” which President Biden did at the G-7 summit in Cornwall.
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Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden last month ordered the US intelligence agencies to “redouble” their efforts to determine the virus origins. The agencies will report back to the president about their findings by the end of August.
COVID-19 origins – What we know so far?
- On March 31, 2021, World Health Organisation (WHO) released its report on COVID-19 origins. WHO said that the virus most likely originated in bats and spread to humans through an “unidentified intermediary animal”. The report claimed viral escape from a laboratory “extremely unlikely”.
- A White House-led investigation came up with two likely scenarios – animal to human transmission or a lab leak (from the labs inside Wuhan Institute of Virology).
- On May 5, 2021, Nicholas Wade, a former Science Journalist with the New York Times and former Editor of the ‘Nature’ and ‘Science’ journals self-published a scathing 12,000-word article on virus origins which stoked the debate more in the favour of lab-leak scenario.
- Wade argued that in over a year and a half Chinese researchers failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019.
- A fact sheet by the US State Department dated January 15, 2020, noted that three researchers at Wuhan Institute of Virology sought treatment for a COVID-like illness weeks before the first case of the virus was reported.
- On June 7, 2021, Wall Street Journal reported that a report by a US government laboratory concluded that a “virus leak from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is plausible and deserves further investigation”.
- Reports have suggested that between 2012 and 2015, Wuhan Institute of Virology’s researchers led by acclaimed Chinese researcher Shi Zhengli found as many as 293 coronaviruses in and around the Mojiang mine in China.
- Beijing, meanwhile, has refused to acknowledge the lab-leak scenario and has been persistent on the “natural origins” of COVID-19.