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A US congressional report on the origins of COVID-19 drastically exaggerated budget numbers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) by up to a thousandfold, misleading the public and the media with false information.
The report cited the exaggerated numbers to suggest that something "unusual" was happening at the WIV, speculating "safety concerns and unusual maintenance" as "evidence of a lab leak."
The report, published in early August by the US House Foreign Affairs Committee minority staff led by Republican Representative Michael McCaul, includes on Page 20 a chart that quoted figures from the WIV's government procurement web pages. For unknown reasons, the numbers in the report far exceeded those on the WIV website.
The chart includes a total of seven budget figures. Three were exaggerated tenfold, one was exaggerated a hundredfold, and one was exaggerated a thousandfold.
Take the budget for a new ventilation system at the WIV as an example. It was recorded as 3.92687694 million yuan or just under 3.93 million yuan on the Chinese web page. But the number in the congressional report was $606 million -- equal to 3.93 billion yuan, 1,000 times the number originally written in Chinese.
Similarly, the budget for security services was 830,000 yuan, but the number was translated into English as $1.3 million?-- equal to 8.3 million yuan, 10 times the number in Chinese.
It is unknown how the errors came into existence as the media contact person for Representative Michael McCaul did not reply to emailed requests.
A joint WHO-China study on the origins of COVID-19, published at the end of March, said that a lab leak was "extremely unlikely." A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson on Aug 3 called the US congressional report "not credible or scientific."
Recently, two major newspapers in the United States on their opinion pages cited the exaggerated numbers sourced from the congressional report. They later issued corrections.
The Wall Street Journal correction said, "The authors relied on a House Foreign Affairs Committee report, which cited an evidently mistranslated Chinese document."
The Washington Post correction said, "The congressional report referenced in this article misstated the value of service contract requests issued by the Wuhan Institute of Virology in September 2019."
The congressional report itself remains uncorrected.
Produced by Xinhua Global Service
KUALA LUMPUR - The origins-tracing of a virus during a pandemic should uphold the principle of science rather than politicizing the effort, the Chinese Ambassador to Malaysia wrote in an article published recently.
The article, which was titled "Upholding Science in Virus-Tracing," was published on Thursday in leading Malaysian newspapers including the Star, New Strait Times and Sinchew Daily.
"The purpose of virus origins-tracing is to enhance the scientific understanding about viruses, allowing countries to deal with major infectious diseases in the future," Chinese Ambassador Ouyang Yujing wrote in the article.
From mankind's experience, the origins-tracing of AIDS, Ebola, MERS, SARS and the 2009 Swine Flu involved complicated scientific problems across multiple disciplines and fields. The origins-tracing of COVID-19 is no different, and the answer can only be found by scientists through research, he wrote.
An increasing amount of evidence shows that the novel coronavirus has long been lurking in human communities. Research conducted by medical institutions and medical experts showed that COVID-19 was detected in Europe as early as November 2019, and they believed that based on the overall situation, it is an obvious fact that COVID-19 has multiple origins and broke out in multiple places, the article read.
On July 5, 24 internationally-renowned scientists, including a well-known Malaysian virologist, published an open letter in The Lancet noting that COVID-19 generated and evolved in nature, it said.
On July 7, scientists from the United States, Britain and Australia published a preprint paper on Zenodo, a European research data-sharing platform, pointing out that no evidence showed COVID-19 originated from the Wuhan labs, it further said.
Nonetheless, several countries disregard these existing pieces of scientific evidence. Instead, they politicize the matter, instruct intelligence agencies to carry out origins-tracing investigations, smear and slander other countries, and even threaten and press the World Health Organization (WHO) secretariat and international experts by all kinds of means, the article said.
China actively engaged in origins-tracing cooperation with the WHO from the early outbreak of COVID-19, and shared the genome sequencing of the virus at the earliest time possible, the ambassador wrote in the article.
China also invited WHO experts to China twice for origins-tracing research, and provided the expert team full support. They visited every site on their list and met every individual they asked for, it said.
After that, the WHO released the China-WHO joint study report on COVID-19 origins-tracing which clearly concluded that a lab leak of COVID-19 is "extremely unlikely."
Over 80 countries, whether through letters to the WHO director-general, statements or diplomatic notes, expressed their support for the China-WHO joint study report and opposed the politicizing of COVID-19 origin-tracing, the article further said.
More than 300 political parties, organizations and think tanks from over 100 countries and regions submitted a joint statement to the WHO secretariat, urging the WHO to conduct COVID-19 origins-tracing research in an objective and fair manner, it added.
"The virus has no borders, nor does it recognize ethnicity. China, like other countries, is a victim of the pandemic," the ambassador noted.
"As the virus continues to mutate and wreak havoc, combating the pandemic remains our utmost priority," he said.
HONG KONG - An observer said the question of COVID-19 origins is a scientific one and US President Joe Biden's quest for intelligence on the origins is a bad joke.
The intelligence agencies are hardly the ones to decide a question of science or to provide the truth in any realm, John Walsh, who was until recently Professor of Physiology and Cellular Neuroscience at University of Massachusetts Medical School, said in a commentary published in Asia Times on Aug 23.
Walsh said the intelligence agencies are discredited, citing their deception about the "Global War on Terror" for the past 20-plus years.
The 90-day deadline for the intelligence agencies to complete the investigations is another absurdity, he said.
"Finding the origins of pandemics has taken many years or decades, and sometimes the problem has remained unsolved," he said, stressing that science does not proceed according to a schedule.
He pointed out that blaming China is a distraction from the miserable performance of the United States in handling the pandemic.
"Let us not repeat the many errors of the past by trusting the COVID-19 question to America's discredited and disgraced intel agencies," Walsh said. "Let the scientists do their work."
WASHINGTON - The investigation of the origins of COVID-19 should be dealt with solely by scientists and any politicization of this issue is deeply regretted and damaging global cooperation in the fight against the pandemic, said a renowned US scholar.
"The (COVID) origins inquiry...should be left to the scientists to do, and it will take time to come to a conclusion on that," Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies, told Xinhua in an interview.
"But a lot of the evidence will be hard to sift through if it is not done during the early stages. So there should not be any interruptions and this sort of political raking up of issues stalls the issues at the scientists," Gupta said of the US intelligence community's probe of the origins of the virus.
The US intelligence community reached an inconclusive assessment about the origins of the virus following a 90-day investigation ordered by President Joe Biden, according to an unclassified summary of the probe released on Friday.
The report which "tends to give an equivalence to all the various theories" is "in my view very unfair" and will be remembered as "something negative", he said.
By doing this, the United States is "trying to maintain those two big narratives" as it first proposed that China was not transparent about the origins of the virus and was not quick enough to deal with and inform the global community about the virus, said Gupta.
"The whole purpose is to blacken China on the COVID-19 in some way. And that is how it has played out in the US media with US political leaders, giving oxygen to this argument, and considering the power of Western media that will de facto hover above us in some way, shape or form, even down the line," he said.
"They will try to stick that in our images, in our head. And so that itself is a challenge for China to deal with considering the power of the Western media," Gupta said.
The expert noted that "unfortunately there has been so much politics" with regard to the fight against COVID-19 starting from origins of the virus to masks and vaccination, and so on.
"Now what we are in fact having is a lack of political will to actually come together to deal with COVID-19. And the origins issue has hurt the political space to cooperate at a multilateral level and to deepen multilateral cooperation on global public health," said Gupta.
"We should have been thinking of a whole-scale route and brand-changing in how global public health is dealt with at the multilateral level. There has just not been that political foundation and political momentum to do it because so much of it has been spent in bickering about origins from a very politicized angle," he said.
"I think in the long run that will hurt us as a global community of not being able to create that institutional infrastructure to tackle these sorts of pandemics in the future," he said.
"There will be many more of these, and we know the extent of the damage it has created, not just in terms of human life, but also in terms of economic dislocation ... that is why any politicization of this issue is deeply regretted," said Gupta.
"I think the origins inquiry, which will take time, must allow to be proceeded on its own steam," he said, adding that the task "has been dealt with by scientists and should be dealt with solely by scientists".
Gupta said what China has done in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is "incredibly commendable".
China's COVID response "has preserved human life. And I think it will, in the longer run, be a case study of how you deal with viruses", he said. "China has the global public health case study which will be written for posterity on how it needs to be followed."
"I think East Asia broadly, and China specifically, have done a great job. And this is really the model of how pandemics need to be dealt with in the future," he said.
Despite numerous accidents relating to viruses in biological research laboratories in the United States over the years, most seem to gain scant media or public attention.
Officials and scholars have lashed out at the expected release of a 90-day review by the United States intelligence community on COVID-19 origins, saying that it will sabotage a global joint response toward the virus and betray science.
Such a hasty review done by the intelligence community will only add to the number of questions, serve the US domestic political agenda, stoke racial hatred toward Asians and further worsen US ties with China, they warned.
"A deep investigation of everything that happened at Fort Detrick would be interesting indeed, but difficult for reasons of secrecy," said Stephen Kinzer, senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
"Fort Detrick is an enormous complex; it has been for decades the center of American military research related to biology ... some of what's going on there a secret. For a long time, people were coming out, protesting outside the gates of Fort Detrick for projects of which we don't know the nature," Kinzer, a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, told Xinhua in a recent interview.
Officials and scholars have lashed out at the expected release of a 90-day review by the United States intelligence community on COVID-19 origins, saying that it will sabotage a global joint response toward the virus and betray science.
Such a hasty review done by the intelligence community will only add to the number of questions, serve the US domestic political agenda, stoke racial hatred toward Asians and further worsen US ties with China, they warned.
The highly anticipated report on COVID-19 origins is finally set to be dropped. Ordered three months ago by American president Joe Biden and compiled by America's intelligence community, the report will arrive with the perfect timing—when the US military, guided by the thorough calculus of US intelligence, has completed a swift and successful withdrawal of its troops lingering in Afghanistan.
Well, this all depends on how you define "successful" and how you view America's intelligence community, which frequently offers up one-of-a-kind intelligence reports from time to time.
If you are expecting a meticulous, watertight report that is in accordance with science and facts, you will probably find yourself disappointed. But if you are looking for a specious, preposterous, and Iraq-Has-Weapons-Of-Mass-Destruction-kind of piece, it's definitely worth the wait.
In churning out gibberish and farcical accounts, the US intelligence community is rarely seen as reliable, and its output has certainly been stable in its quality. A brief review of its history will demonstrate how "trustworthy" the intel body has been. From the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to the 9/11 Attacks, from the Fall of Saigon to the disgraceful fleeing of Kabul (not to mention the W.M.D. saga during the Iraq War)—the US intelligence community has carried the torch of amateurish intel gathering in its surefire attempt to further fan the flames of war and confrontation.
Taking a break from spying on American allies, the US intelligence community has been allocated with the significant task of tracking down the origins of COVID-19, capturing the spotlight and taking over the tasks of scientists.
Biden's move to let intelligence personnel masquerade as scientists is appalling but unsurprising. After all, America is plagued with not only SARS?CoV?2 but also a blend of anti-science viruses, reducing them into a melting pot where masks are abandoned, vaccines rejected, and scientists taunted, where misinformation spreads as fast as the virus, and the voices of conspiracists and quacks speak louder than scientists and doctors.
What to expect?
On August 23, Jen Psaki, White House Press Secretary, revealed that the findings of the 90-day intelligence probe into the origins of COVID-19 would be finished this Tuesday, but that it would take a few days before it is declassified and made public.
What you may ask is the fresh report all about? A similar report concocted by the Republican Party may offer a few clues.
Earlier this month, the GOP disseminated a so-called "detailed" report on the COVID-19 lab leak conspiracy, offering their version of the COVID-19 probe, weeks ahead of the deadline of the report ordered by Joe Biden. In the GOP report, farfetched concerns and farcical trifles were pieced together to form "circumstantial evidence" pointing to a "lab leak" in China, e.g., major renovations to air safety and waste treatment systems in research facilities, satellite imagery of Wuhan in September and October 2019 showing "a significant increase in hospital visits and internet searches for COVID-19 symptoms," and the like. Come on… the world's self-proclaimed most powerful intelligence community is better than this.
Apart from the aforementioned tricks, Biden's intelligence squad might have mobilized some other cheap shots in vain. CNN reported on August 6 that American intelligence agencies had gained access to a catalog of virus-related information that contained genetic data from virus samples studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Hard as they tried, experts like Professor Jin Dongyan of Hong Kong University, believed that "no concrete conclusion can be reached in the analysis of indirect and circumstantial data. " "The sequence cannot tell where SARS-CoV-2 comes from. It could even be counterproductive, just raising more questions," said Jin.
During an interview with CNBC's "Squawk Box" on August 23, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins reiterated that he believed the SARS?CoV?2 more likely has a natural origin, standing firmly along the long line of scientists who hold their belief against conspiracies and unscientific noises. "The vast evidence from other perspectives says no, this was a naturally occurring virus," Collins said.
The reason why the US has been constantly belittling WHO's February report on the origins of COVID-19 and later decided to create their own versions of the report is very easy to fathom: the report didn't provide the conviction they wanted it to provide. Unless there is a guilty verdict, the US wouldn't give up so easily. In scapegoating China for its calamitous mishandling of the coronavirus, the US is following the same pattern used in framing China on Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and a whole spectrum of other issues: it created piles of anti-China documents packed with lies and disinformation and pressed for further investigations, all from a stance of moral supremacy.
Whatever its findings, the COVID-19 origin report ordered by Joe Biden will at least divert some of the public's attention away from the recent developments in Afghanistan, which has dragged the president's support levels to a new all-time low. But the report proceedings will undoubtedly do nothing to persuade American citizens to put on their masks or roll up their sleeves in the fight against the virus. More likely than not, the report will merely serve as a piece of wastepaper that bears no other value than inciting hatred.
HONG KONG - Washington's stance on investigating the origins of COVID-19 seems more about politics, in particular "engaging China from a position of strength", said an opinion piece published in the South China Morning Post Tuesday.
The article, entitled "What does the United States really hope to achieve with its probe into coronavirus' origins?" was written by Gary Wong Chi-him, a board member of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong & Macao Studies.
In late March, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a report on the global tracing of COVID-19's origins, following a 28-day joint study in Wuhan by 34 experts from the WHO and China.
While the world was still digesting the findings from the first phase of the origins-tracing study, US President Joe Biden in May ordered the US intelligence community to produce a report on the origins of COVID-19 within 90 days.
"The 90-day investigation by the US intelligence community has a slim chance of producing anything meaningful. Worse, it could further distract from the WHO's course of study and hinder progress in pandemic control and prevention," said the article.
"They are unlikely to produce a definitive answer" and "few outside the United States will accept its conclusion" because there is no independent corroboration, Wong Chi-him cited what Foreign Affairs magazine wrote this month.
"The United States would be wise to decouple public health and geopolitics. It should re-engage and build on the work the WHO has started and protect its citizens by learning from its pandemic failures," said his article.
Origins tracing has been one of the priorities of China's scientific research since the COVID-19 outbreak, and Chinese scientists have done a lot of work on this issue, Xu Nanping, vice minister of Science and Technology, said at a recent press conference on COVID-19 origins tracing.
Origins tracing is substantially a scientific matter, so scientific research has played a crucial role in searching for origins of the virus, said Xu.
Responding to the call by the Chinese government to make the utmost effort to find out where the virus came from, Chinese research groups from academic institutes and universities carried out scientific research on a number of priority areas including animals, humans, molecules and the environment.
In terms of tracing animal origins, Xu said researchers conducted nationwide viral tests over wild animals, poultry and livestock in 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions soon after the outbreak, covering dozens of species, such as pigs, cattle, sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, pigeons, turkeys, wild rabbits and wild boars.
"We tested more than 80,000 samples over a short period of time, and no COVID-19 antibodies or positive nucleic acid test results were detected."
The researchers further conducted COVID-19 challenge trials on animals in the lab, and classified them into such groups as "highly susceptible", "not susceptible" or "resistant to COVD-19", which Xu said helped them "further understand the situation and determine the priorities in tracing animal origins."
Through studies on coronaviruses carried by bats and other animals, the researchers found that the suspicious RaTG13 bat coronavirus has a remote evolutionary relationship with SARS-CoV-2.
They also detected multiple strains of coronavirus in smuggled pangolins seized by customs, among which the highest genome homology with SARS-CoV-2 is 92.4 percent, lower than RaTG13, but one strain shows 96.9-percent amino acid homology with SARS-CoV-2, higher than that of RaTG13, indicating that pangolin coronavirus may have played a role in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2, Xu explained.
He added that joint efforts with international scientists facilitated the origins tracing work.
By July 19, Chinese researchers and their counterparts from the US, the UK and other countries had jointly published 225 articles related to tracing origins of the virus. Chinese and US medical scientists held six dialogues via video link on containment of COVID-19, said Xu.
Efforts on data and information sharing were also beefed up with a database for global sharing established, he added." By July 19, the 2019 Novel Coronavirus Resource database had garnered and shared more than 2.53 million collections of worldwide SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences, and offered access to almost 300,000 users from 177 countries and regions."
Chinese scientists' work was recognized by experts from the World Health Organization (WHO).
Peter Daszak, a British zoologist and member of the WHO team to Wuhan, told the New York Times about the cooperative and extensive work that Chinese scientists had done.
Daszak said they were provided with new data on their first day, and when asked for more data, "the Chinese scientists would go off, and a couple of days later, they've done the analysis, and we've got new information. It was extremely useful."
He added that what the Chinese scientists did in the Wuhan Huanan seafood wholesale market, where the first cases were linked to in China, was "a very extensive study, swabbing every surface of this place."
"They'd actually done over 900 swabs in the end, a huge amount of work. They had been through the sewage system. They'd been into the air ventilation shaft to look for bats. They'd caught animals around the market," he added.
Following the ill-coordinated, messy US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Kabul has fallen into the hands of the Taliban at astonishing speed. The entire world is watching the change of flag from black, red and green of Afghanistan to the white with black Shahadah of the Taliban.
The collapse of the Ashraf Ghani-led Afghan government was so swift that it gave no time to the tens of foreign embassies to evacuate their diplomats and other staff. Even more worrisome is the fate of those Afghan people who have worked for the United States administration since the US-led forces launched the Afghanistan War in 2001.
