Through the lens. Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

The 90-day investigation that US President Joe Biden has ordered the US intelligence agencies to conduct to dig the origins of the COVID-19 has come to an end. Many US media outlets revealed that the intelligence community has failed to give a conclusive answer to whether the virus was leaked from a lab or was transmitted from animals to humans. Some media claimed the result may disappoint Biden.

This is just a farce in which the US has been so engaged. Washington has created different roles in it, choreographed both cliffhangers and emotional expressions. It is not an easy job to put on a fake show in such a serious manner.

Origins tracing is an arduous task. The outbreak of the pandemic must be the result of a combination of many accidental factors. Most of the scenes have disappeared, and scientists can only look for clues through existing scientific means to find out how the virus transmitted at the very beginning, in an attempt to reestablish the scenario of the earliest outbreak. This is a highly professional and scientific area which requires the full cooperation of global scientists. This is simply not a task that could be achieved by the intelligence community of a certain country.

What the US is playing are political games. The charge that the virus was leaked from a Wuhan lab was made up by former US president Donald Trump last year to take the blame for his failure in the battle against COVID-19 in the US. Almost the entire American academic and media communities rejected the charge. When Biden assumed office, he has also messed up the fight against the US epidemic. And he is thus more in need of containing China. With stronger capability to mobilize US public opinion, Biden's team arbitrarily brought the infamous "lab leak" theory back to life.

Origins tracing, a profound yet not so urgent scientific issue, has been made a big fuss by the US, as if this is more important and urgent than developing a specific medicine to cure the deadly COVID-19. This is absurd in itself. If it were not to set up a trap to contain China, Washington and its allies would not have done so with such great efforts. 

US intelligence agencies simply do not have the scientific capability to complete the origins-tracing task. With a large number of countries and the scientific communities opposing politicizing the origins tracing of COVID-19, the CIA and other relevant forces probably have a guilty conscience now. However, according to the media disclosure, they maintained a question - whether the virus originated from the Wuhan lab, in a mysterious atmosphere, while trying to direct the public to focus on Wuhan, trying to downplay the growing number of COVID-19 cases identified in many other parts of the world, especially in the US, which emerged earlier than the first reported cases in Wuhan. 

In other words, the "mystery" the US intelligence agencies have been trying to maintain - did the virus come from a laboratory or a seafood market in Wuhan? - is far from the real question that needs to be answered in front of scientists and the public from all over the world - did the virus land on Earth in the US or in other parts of the globe pretty much earlier than it landed in Wuhan? The only purpose of Washington's so-called intelligence review into the origins of COVID-19 is to strengthen the accusations against China and to frame China. The report made up by the US intelligence agencies displays no sign of taking a single step back from this fundamental goal.

The US government and its intelligence agencies have sufficient capacity to manipulate mainstream Western media outlets, pushing them not to deviate from "holding China accountable" when interpreting and citing the report. The US has discovered and confirmed COVID-19 deaths that took place as early as in January 2020, meaning they could be infected in November and December in 2019, before the outbreak was reported in Wuhan. What the US has done is trying to prevent global attention from turning to those new findings. 

The bizarre battle over the origins of the virus is marked by geopolitics. The game, with geopolitical energy, will continue to be played for a long time. The US has the long-term political need to make China a scapegoat for Washington's serious failure in the fight against the epidemic. It has the ill strategic intention to harass China through the farce of "holding China accountable." This determines that Washington will not stop its rogue practices and will keep seeking opportunities to create trouble for China. 

China must attach great importance to the long-term game with the US, which might turn out to be a marathon. We should repeatedly clarify facts and reasons to the international public opinion field and promote the basic knowledge of tracing the origins of the COVID-19. The US, as the suspected origin of the virus and the country that has the largest number of infections, needs to be made the new focus of global origins-tracing efforts. The US' Fort Detrick biological laboratory and the University of North Carolina must not be skipped in the world's attention. We will never give up bringing science, reason and justice back to the field of international public opinion.