SECOND TAKE
CHINA DAILY: The US is politicising Covid
China is being presented as unwilling to co-operate with research into the pandemic's origins, but this is not true
China has been open and transparent since it first identified the novel coronavirus outbreak, and has done all it can to share its epidemic prevention and control and therapeutic experience with the international community.
The country has received two batches of World Health Organization (WHO) experts to conduct relevant field research, and has made positive contributions to the global virus origin tracing work.
Despite this, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told the media that China will face “isolation in the international community” if it does not co-operate with further probes into the origin of the pandemic. This is baldfaced political blackmail and intimidation.
China supports the WHO’s efforts to trace the origins of the virus, considering it to be vital to avoid a resurgence in future. But it must be a scientific procedure including scientists from around the world and conducted in different countries and regions.
This is also the consensus of the international community. It is the US that is being isolated from the rest of the world by its attempts to politicise and manipulate efforts to determine the origins of the virus. The US is trying to hijack the global work to serve its own purpose of containing China by making it a scapegoat for the pandemic.
If the US administration really cares about the truth, it should start by holding accountable those who squandered the opportunity of taming the virus in the country when it was first spreading. Instead of trying to pin the blame on China, somebody in Washington should be held responsible for the ineffectual response that has enabled the virus to claim more than 600,000 lives in the country.
And if the US administration really cares about the truth, it should act on reports that blood samples from at least 39 people in California, Oregon and Washington taken between December 13 and 16 2019 contained Covid-19 antibodies, according to a report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
With those clues and as one of the worst-hit countries in the pandemic, the US administration has every reason to co-operate with the WHO on virus origin tracing studies in the US. /Beijing, June 22
China Daily