2022年04月21日 星期四
Tracing the Origin of COVID-19 Should Be De-politicized
Edited by QI Liming

  

  Two years after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, scientists continue to debate how the coronavirus first infected humans.

  Blindly blaming China and politicizing the tracing of the novel coronavirus source is not conducive to a rational and objective tracing of the coronavirus by the international scientific community.

  While China is actively endeavoring to trace the origin of COVID-19, contain the disease and develop the vaccine, the U.S. government, however, is trying to cover up its inaction on the pandemic through befouling China.

  As U.S. freelance journalist Rob Garver commented earlier this year, in the two years since COVID-19 began ravaging his country, virtually every aspect of the pandemic has been politicized, often to the detriment of efforts to bring the disease under control and to treat its victims.

  Garver said, "So far, discussion of the pandemic's origins and the federal response have tended to be highly politicized. In the earliest days of the pandemic, then-President Donald Trump was eager to downplay the severity of the crisis, a stance many of his political supporters adopted."

  In the earlier stages of the pandemic, Republicans were suspicious of any commission tasked with investigating the pandemic, out of concern that its findings would be used as a cudgel against the Trump administration.

  Kristin Urquiza, one of the co-founders of an advocacy group for families affected by the pandemic known as Marked by COVID, said that, "Our worry from day one was that a commission would turn into a witch hunt for either China or President Trump."

  According to Medical News Today, there is still uncertainty about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. And this may be due, in some measure, to a lack of international cooperation, said Prof. Jonathan Stoye, a virologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

  "One mistake was to start pointing fingers at China and blaming them for the origin of this virus," he said.

  Meanwhile Nature magazine contributor Youngmee Jee, an infectious-diseases researcher and chief executive at the Pasteur Institute in South Korea, disagrees with those who said that China is withholding data on COVID-19's origins. She said that origin investigations usually take many years, and pointed out that Chinese researchers have already conducted a number of relevant studies to find the origin.

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