Opinion | Anti-China animosity mars next stage of coronavirus origin study plan

In March this year, a World Health Organization (WHO) team of international experts conducted the China part of a global study on the origins of Covid-19. The experts visited every place and met everyone they wanted to see.

Based on an in-depth analysis of the data, the WHO released a joint study that concluded that the introduction of the coronavirus through a laboratory incident was extremely unlikely. The study also pointed the way for the next stage of joint origin tracing in multiple countries and regions under a global framework.

Unfortunately, some countries have turned a blind eye to the report, continued to presume China guilty and even demanded the WHO Secretariat come up with a plan for the second phase of the study into the origins of Covid-19. Instead of facilitating science-based origin tracing, some politicians in these countries keep spreading the anti-China political virus, both to shift responsibility for their own botched pandemic response and to fabricate a new excuse to contain China.

From the beginning, they have politicised the pandemic, stigmatised China with terms such as “Wuhan virus” and weaponised origin tracing to bash China. A few have even peddled the so-called lab leak theory.

China will never accept any origin-tracing plan that is a political move to discredit it instead of a scientific one to identify the origins of the virus.

The work plan on a second-phase origin study is inconsistent with the 73rd World Health Assembly resolution. It also ignores the conclusions and recommendations of the first-stage research, undoing the open, transparent and responsible scientific efforts before. Nearly 70 countries have written to the WHO, agreeing with the results of the first-phase study and opposing the politicisation of origin tracing.