Shifting blame reflects selfishness of US

Tourists are seen near the White House in Washington, D.C., the United States, July 26, 2021. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

Recently, the US has led several countries and media outlets in hyping up the claim that the novel coronavirus was the result of a "lab leak".

While the world is fighting a tough battle against the highly contagious Delta variant of the novel coronavirus, the US, which turned to its intelligence services rather than science in its approach to virus origin-tracing, has exposed its selfishness and played the old trick of passing the buck to others.

No matter how hard it attempts to politicize the virus, the US can't ignore the fact that it has failed to contain the spread of COVID-19.

According to a tally by Johns Hopkins University, total confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US have exceeded 35 million, and more than 610,000 people have died from the disease.

The US faces uneven vaccination rates. Although the overall vaccination rate in the US is about 50 percent, there is a large gap in rates among states.

According to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the average 7-day daily increase of confirmed cases as of July 30 has been on the rise since mid-June.

According to data released by the CDC on July 31, 101,171 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 were reported across the US on July 30, the highest single-day increase since February 7 this year.

The failure of the US in the fight against the pandemic has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people, and made relations between different ethnic groups even worse.

By politicizing virus origin-tracing, the US has exposed its selfishness. The US has tarnished its own image as a major country in the world by hoarding vaccines, restricting exports of materials for producing vaccines, being indifferent to the anti-pandemic situations in developing countries and putting its own interests above other countries' and promoting vaccine nationalism.

In fact, politicizing virus origin-tracing is a continuation of the US' habit of blaming other countries in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, a tactic the US had adopted since the onset of the crisis. Incapable of coping with various problems, the US shifted the blame to China to try to hide the truth that it has failed to control COVID-19 and is responsible for the global spread of the virus.

In the early days after the pandemic broke out, the Lancet published a joint statement from 27 leading medical experts, who overwhelmingly concluded that the coronavirus originated in wildlife. The statement dismissed the US' conspiracy theory on coronavirus origins.

According to a report released by the World Health Organization on March 30 this year, the introduction of COVID-19 through a laboratory incident is "extremely unlikely".

On July 7, 21 scientists from around the world published an article titled "On the origin of SARS-CoV-2 -- The blind watchmaker argument", which said that SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to have evolved in a market in a big city and even less likely to have been created in a laboratory.

On July 17, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the United States, said in an interview that the most likely explanation is a natural evolution from an animal reservoir to a human.

By spreading rumors and hyping up the "ab leak" theory, the US has hindered global anti-pandemic efforts. Nature magazine said in a recently published article that the "lab leak" theory is likely to block the process of tracing the origins of the virus, and has made scientists who uphold the truth the target of cyber violence.

According to the Washington Post, Anthony Fauci and Stanley Perlman, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa, have both been attacked by right-wing extremists in the US.

Virus origin-tracing is a matter of science, and political manipulation can only block the truth-seeking process, hinder science-based efforts, sabotage international anti-pandemic cooperation, and exacerbate the pandemic.