Washington plays old dirty tricks to smear China

By Zhou Fujing

The US has recently seen a rapid deterioration of the pandemic situation and a huge bounce in daily new infections due to the ravaging Delta variant of COVID-19 and its stagnant vaccination drive. According to August 11 CNN report, more than 98% of US residents now live in an area where there is a "high" or "substantial" risk of COVID-19 community transmission. Though as one of the worst-hit countries around the world, what the US government is busy with is not to contain the virus spread to protect the lives of its citizens. Instead, some US politicians remain shifting responsibilities for their own mistakes in responding to the pandemic, taking origin tracing of COVID-19 as an excuse.

It's not strange at all given what the country had done over the past century. It acted similar with regard to how to name the Great Influenza epidemic in 1918-1919, during which the Great Influenza epidemic had swept the world and took millions of lives. Apart from the huge numbers of death, how to name it was even more astonishing. It was later named as "Spanish flu" because Spain was the first country to report the disease.

American historian John Hamilton said it was not a "Spanish flu". Why was it so named? He explained that during the World War I, the US, Germany, France and others used censorship, and they did not want too much information about the flu to disrupt the war effort. So, Spain became a scapegoat for generating the flu.

The pandemic was not originated from Spain, and the "patient zero" was from the US. In early March 1918, a cook at Camp Funston, Kansas reported sick with a fever. In just a few days, over 500 soldiers fell ill, and the number surged to 1,100 at the end of the month. John M. Barry, who wrote The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, said the Great Influenza emerged in rural Haskell County, Kansas, which firstly reported the deadly flu. The virus was then transmitted from a military camp to another. By the spring, over half of the camps were infected, and the virus went to Europe with the soldiers, and spread further.

A century has passed. The United States picks up the old dirty trick again in Covid-19 origin tracking. It is reported that the US still intends to release a report on origins tracing as scheduled and to make up misleading conclusions on virus-leaking from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, although there is no tangible evidence yet found in the "origins tracing investigation" by the US intelligence agencies. Senior US officials were quoted in the reports by saying that "the investigation is not the purpose and that launching the investigation itself bears its meaning." These remarks serve as a confession of the US manipulation for presumption of guilt.

China has been supportive and cooperative with WHO in science-based origins study. China has twice invited WHO to Wuhan for joint research, which produced scientific and authoritative conclusions and laid the foundation for the next-phase global origin tracing. But the U.S. has been politicizing the coronavirus origin tracing. No matter how hard the US has tried to smear and falsely accuse China, it does not help to dispel doubts of the international community about more than 200 of US bio-labs all over the world. If there is nothing to hide, it's time for the United Sates to invite the WHO to carry out origins tracing, especially at Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina. 

(The views don't necessarily represent those of the CCTV.com.)