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Sunday, June 28, 2020, 15:01
More reports of early virus justify fair probe of origin free of scapegoating
By Ong Tee Keat
Sunday, June 28, 2020, 15:01 By Ong Tee Keat

When the world still remains in the shadow of COVID-19 outbreak, scientists' efforts in getting to the bottom of the pandemic origin and cause seemed to have been drowned in the seas of political posturing featured by unsubstantiated scapegoating from the White House and truth-defying conspiracy theories.

Washington seems to be seeking to ramp up the China-bashing in establishing Beijing's culpability of the outbreak spread, but more new scientific findings came to light, exposing that there were cases of dubious respiratory illness prior to the outbreak in Wuhan outside China.

On March 11, Robert Redfield, director of US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while testifying to the Congress, admitted that numerous fatalities of respiratory illness with pulmonary fibrosis symptoms had been miscategorized as flu. These symptoms, akin to that of COVID-19, had apparently flown below the American regulatory radar and were only found posthumously. 

ALSO READ: Officials, academics worldwide say no COVID-19 origin proof

Though he stopped short of revealing the timeline and localities of such deaths, in retrospect, one of the outbreaks at Greenspring Retirement Community, Virginia --- with 63 cases of infections out of a total of 263 residents -- reported by the American media on July 13, 2019 seems to befit the description then, albeit it was not reported to the World Health Organization. Neither did the CDC alert the American public on the real cause of the outbreak.

Certainly, dubious cases of such nature warrant in-depth investigation by the WHO-led team if an independent international probe were to be conducted to trace the origin and cause of the pandemic.

If at all the Wuhan laboratory has to be scrutinized for fear that the outbreak might have begun through contact with infected animals or simply due to a probable accidental leak, as was suggested by the Director of National Intelligence of the United States, the same is equally  applicable to the Fort Detrick Army Biodefense laboratory in Maryland, which was closed in August 2019 purportedly due to biosafety considerations after a number of pneumonia cases or pneumonia-like illness were diagnosed in its vicinity.

Put it plainly: Why must the proposed investigation focus only on Wuhan --- the epicenter of the known initial outbreak --- when more new clues linked to the virus origin were progressively resurrected across the world?

It was reported that the coronavirus outbreak in France was not caused by cases imported from China, but from a locally circulating strain of unknown origin, according to a new study by French scientists at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Genetic analysis showed that the dominant types of the viral strains in France belonged to a clade–or group with a common ancestor – that did not come from China or Italy, the earliest hotspot in Europe.  The latest news from Spain says researchers at the University of Barcelona had detected the presence of the novel coronavirus in waste water samples collected here on March 12, 2019.

Even the United Kingdom reported clues of December cases, as Dean of medicine at Buckingham University Karol Sikora recently told the media, “it is likely that the coronavirus has been here at least in December, not in pandemic form but in isolated small pockets.”

Parallel to these, what might baffle the American politicians -- who have been viewing the pandemic issue through the lens of their obsessed antipathy to Beijing -- was that the early outbreak in the US apparently owed its origin not from China. A team of geneticists from Oxford University had reportedly found that the dominant strains circulating in China and Asia were genetically younger than some popular strains in the US.

Compounded by the timeline of July and August 2019 outbreaks in Virginia and Maryland which were diagnosed posthumously, this has further obfuscated the virus origin and its trail of spread.

By heaping the blames against China in attempts designed to isolate it and to stymie its rise in geopolitical influence might suit the bipartisan consensual agenda on the Capitol Hill, but certainly not a viable option in arresting the rapid spike of pandemic and the floundering economy from coast to coast in the US.

The escalating China-bashing, if not demonizing, might succeed in cultivating a pervasive negative perception of its strategic-partner-turned-rival, however it virtually contributed nothing to enable us in getting closer to the truth of the deadly contagion.

READ MORE: COVID-19 testing goes on, rain or shine

As the world is getting globalized with everyone’s interests intertwined, multilateral collaboration in pursuit of our shared destiny is now nothing but hard facts of reality. This is all the more relevant in the wake of mounting existential cataclysms.

In this perspective, the international community, big and small nations alike, has every right to an impartial, independent investigation of the coronavirus origin and its cause when the pandemic recedes.

But any probe motivated by pre-judged prejudice would only dent the credibility of such a multilateral endeavor in addressing the public health crisis, and consequentially reducing it to a meaningless tool serving the very interest of specific nations in their bid to devastate the targeted country in the global geopolitical contest.

The author is chairman of Centre for New Inclusive Asia (CNIA), based in Kuala Lumpur


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