"America first" - The largest strike against multilateralism

Instead of working on pandemic control at home, some American politicians are going on with their same old tricks, stigmatizing other countries, labeling the virus, and politicizing the origin tracing work.

This year, the US called a few of its allies to deny the China-WHO joint research on the global tracing of COVID-19 origins. Making hypes of the "lab leak theory," Washington has a clear goal - to shift the blame for its inability in pandemic control and oppress China.

Stephen Kinzer, senior fellow with the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, said that Fort Detrick, which had cooperated with Japanese war criminals, is still a research center of the US for biological warfare.

However, a US media organization revealed an internal warning from the US government that persuaded government officials “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”

While putting aside the questions raised by the international community, the US is bragging about its support for multilateral approaches. For Washington, the so-called multilateralism is only used to serve its own interests. Such hypocrisy would only hurt the genuine multilateralism that aims at international cooperation.

The second phase of the origin tracing study proposed by the WHO has been opposed by multiple countries because it turns over the conclusion reached in the first stage of the work that the virus could have been originated in multiple countries and regions, and because it takes the so-called lab leak in a Chinese facility as a focus of the study.

Posters designed by Ning Xinran (Intern)