China wants Prof. Ralph Baric of the Dept of Epidemiology, Microbiology and Immunology at the The University of North Carolina investigated
The Pan Afrikanist Watchman
It is about time that the United States stopped peddling untruths that the novel coronavirus was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and instead started to find out what happened in its own labs first.
In a question and answer no-holds-barred virtual press conference with the local media this week, the Chinese Ambassador to Botswana, H.E Wang Xuefeng said it was disappointing that the US has gone to great lengths to try to prove that the novel coronavirus was leaked from a lab in China.
On the contrary, the World Health Organisation (WHO) experts have paid two visits to China and concluded that a lab leak from a Wuhan lab is “extremely unlikely”.
Ambassador Wang explained that the Coronavirus knows no borders and does not distinguish between races. He said that like other countries, China is a victim of the pandemic, and hopes to find out the origin of the virus and cut off its transmission as early as possible.
In fact, China has all along taken a scientific attitude as it engages in global cooperation on science-based origin-tracing. China has always been a supporter of global scientific research on the source of the virus and its transmission routes.
China co-sponsored the World Health Assembly (WHA) resolution on COVID-19 and support WHO-led cooperation on zoonotic source research among member states.
Despite the daunting task of domestic prevention and control, China twice invited WHO experts in for the study of origins.
From the 14th January to 10th February this year, Chinese experts and international experts from the WHO and 10 countries formed a joint team and conducted joint research for 28 days in Wuhan.
The Chinese side offered necessary facilitation for the team’s work, fully demonstrating its openness, transparency, and responsible attitude.
Based on this joint research, the WHO released on 30th March a report titled “WHO-convened global study of origins of SARS-CoV-2: China Part”.
The full report can be accessed from the WHO website:
Ambassador Wang said what China and the WHO have conducted is a joint study on origin-tracing, not an investigation.
He said what China opposes is politicizing origin-tracing, origin-tracing that goes against the resolution of the World Health Assembly, and reinventing the wheel without proceeding from the WHO-China joint study report.
“The United States ignores the facts and accuses China of refusing cooperation on origin-tracing. This is utter confusion of black and white, right and wrong”, he lashed at Washington.
He said that for a long time now the US has been persistently hyping up the so-called “Wuhan Institute of Virology lab leak theory” in disregard of the conclusion in the WHO-China study report that “a laboratory origin of the pandemic was considered to be extremely unlikely”.
The US has even gone so far as to “ask the intelligence agency to fabricate a so-called report on origins investigation. If this is not politicizing, what would we call it”, Ambassador Wang wondered?
But he warned that the international community is getting more and more suspicious of the US as it is sparing no effort to smear China by all means.
To be true, Ambassador Wang says the US campaign borders on an attempt to try and deflect people’s attention from the “questionable points and spotty track records” of the bio labs at Fort Detrick.
He asked rhetorically, “What is the US trying to hide”?
Wang said the US cannot whitewash itself by smearing China. He said while the US keeps alleging that the virus came from a lab leak, no one merits a proper investigation more than the US.
According to Wang, the US was the first to start research in recombinant viruses and possesses unrivalled strength in this area. The US has also funded and conducted more research on coronaviruses than any other country.
Reports show that Professor Ralph Baric, known as the “Coronavirus Hunter”, started researching recombinant coronaviruses back in 1990.
Prof Baric’s team has long acquired and honed the capability to recombine and modify coronaviruses. In fact, Baric said in an interview with Italian media outlet PresaDiretta in September 2020 that “it is possible to engineer a virus without leaving a trace”.
For these reasons Ambassador Wang strongly feels that an investigation into Baric’s team and the lab is all, it takes to clarify whether coronavirus research can create or has created novel coronavirus.
He said that the US also has the world’s worst bio-lab safety records. From January 2015 to June 2020, the University of North Carolina reported 28 lab incidents involving genetically engineered organisms to the NIH.
Six of these incidents involved coronaviruses including SARS, MERS, and novel coronavirus, many of which had undergone genetic engineering.
Altogether eight (8) researchers may have got infected. A scientist underwent 14 days of self-quarantine at home after a mouse bite caused potential exposure to a strain of SARS-CoV-2 in April 2020.
All staff members who were faced with potential infection went on with their work and life as usual. Besides, Wang insisted that key details like the nature of the genetic modifications and how the incidents were handled, were “deliberately removed from the incident reports”.
Baric also has close collaboration with the two institutes that engage in research involving high-risk viruses and coronaviruses at Fort Detrick, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), and the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick (IRF-Frederick).
Prof Baric’s rich coronavirus resources and modification technique have been widely used at Fort Detrick through such cooperation.
However, in the fall of 2019 before the outbreak of COVID-19, Fort Detrick-based USAMRIID’s research was temporarily shut down after a Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) investigation found serious safety incidents there.
Ambassador Wang wondered when the US plans to invite WHO experts to investigate the University of North Carolina’s bio-lab and US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).
“We suggest that the US stop slinging mud at others and instead find out what happened in its own labs first”, Wang told the Botswana media houses among them Sunday Standard, Botswana Guardian, Duma Fm, Botswana Gazette, The Patriot on Sunday, and others.
Ambassador Wang allayed fears and perceptions that there was no transparency in the investigation into the origin of Covid19 since it was conducted in partnership with Chinese scientists and that President Joe Biden asked for a renewed investigation into the matter.
He clarified that the 17 international experts who came to China were all selected by the WHO and that most of them are from Western countries including the US, the UK, France, and Australia.
He said that China did not raise any objection to the makeup of the team but instead did a lot of administrative, technical, and logistic support work for the joint study of origins, offered the team every convenience, and arranged a rich itinerary with many site visits.
“The experts on the mission made their own decisions independently as to where they would like to visit, who they would like to talk to, and what they would like to talk about as the fieldwork proceeded. The report is also drafted by the mission independently”.
Wang added that several international experts have said on multiple occasions that they visited all the places they wanted to go and met with all the people they wanted to see, speaking highly of China’s openness and transparency.
The Ambassador said that the WHO-China joint study report on the origins of COVID-19 was produced in full compliance with WHO procedures and with scientific methods.
He said it has proven to be a valuable and authoritative report that can stand the scrutiny of science and history, but sadly, “some in the West always have preconceptions with the presumption of guilt”.
“As long as what they see does not conform to their imagination or conjecture, they will label it as results of the intervention, the lack of independence and transparency”, Ambassador Wang lashed out.
For example, he cited a story that the New York Times published in February accusing China of failing to share important data that may help in identifying the origins of the virus and prevent future outbreaks.
He said the article was slammed by two WHO experts for misquoting them to fit the New York Times’ own narrative and casting shadows over the scientific work of seeking for virus origin.
Peter Daszak, British zoologist and part of the WHO expert team, said on his personal Twitter that it’s shameful for the New York Times to engage in selectively misquoting WHO experts to fit its own narrative:
