Interview: COVID-19 origins tracing should cover U.S. labs, says biologist

MOSCOW, Aug. 18 (Xinhua) -- Tracing the origins of COVID-19 should be conducted on a global scale, including an investigation of U.S. biological laboratories, Russian biologist Alexei Deykin has said.

The United States is a global leader in biotechnology and there have been media reports of accidents at U.S. biological facilities in recent years, said Deykin, a senior scientist with the Institute of Gene Biology at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

People want to know how biological research is controlled and regulated in the United States, he told Xinhua in a recent interview.

Washington opposes negotiations related to a protocol for the verification regime under the framework of the Biological Weapons Convention, while the United States is actively using sites in "gray zone countries," where monitoring compliance with the international convention is difficult, to conduct biological research, he noted.

Biological weapons are much more dangerous than nuclear ones because they can multiply on their own and even affect the entire planet, warned Deykin, also an expert with the Valdai Discussion Club, a Russian think tank.

All versions should be checked when carrying out COVID-19 origins tracing, he stressed, adding that the possibility can't be ruled out that COVID-19 was brought to the central Chinese city of Wuhan by U.S. soldiers during the Military World Games in October 2019.

Deykin believes that the virus could have spread latently before its outbreak, saying "it is quite possible that there were already COVID-19 cases in some countries of the world at the end of 2019. However, they were not classified as the novel coronavirus."

It is "completely unfounded" to claim that COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab, said the molecular biologist, who has studied recombinant organisms for over 15 years.

Deykin praised China for quickly identifying the genome of the virus and taking necessary health measures at the beginning of the epidemic.

China responded appropriately to the epidemic, strived to protect its people and shared information with the international community, he said.