China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin. Photo: VCG

China supports joint efforts from countries around the world to trace the coronavirus origins in the next phase, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Tuesday at a routine press conference, in response to international scientists' recent call to search for earlier COVID-19 cases inside and outside China in the following origins probe. 

In a recent paper published in Nature, 11 international scientists including Dutch virologist Koopmans and EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak said that priorities for follow-up studies include critical trace-back of people and animals in regions inside and outside China that have the earliest evidence for circulation of the virus, and targeted surveys of possible reservoir or intermediate hosts.

China agrees with the advice of international scientists. China has always supported a scientific-oriented research in multiple regions across the world but not limited to one particular place, as the WHO-China joint report on COVID-19 origins in March suggested, Wang Wenbin, spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said on Tuesday. 

With continued research into the novel coronavirus by scientists in many countries, test results have shown that the virus emerged in many localities earlier than dates previously known, said Wang. "Openly-available information shows that a urine sample collected on September 12, 2019 from a measles patient in Italy tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. The sequencing result has been uploaded to open databases."

The so-called US intelligence report on the COVID-19 origins which was released on Friday said the intelligence community failed to make any scientific conclusion and it is a way for the US to shirk responsibility and throw mud at China, Chinese experts said.

Wang pointed out that the US' so-called assessment "is a political report, a scapegoating report and a false report." 

"This truth is crystal clear to all perceptive people in the international community," Wang noted.

Officials and scholars from Pakistan, Cambodia, Egypt, Brazil, Syria and other countries have also published articles to slam the US intelligence community's so-called report on the origins study and lab leak theory, pointing out that political motivation can by no means replace scientific evidence, and that the US should better focus on its own domestic epidemic response and uphold international cooperation rather than pin the blame on other countries, Wang said.

He stressed that China believes that origins tracing is a complex scientific issue which should and can only be studied by global scientists through cooperation. The report co-released by Chinese and WHO scientists in March contains authoritative, professional and science-based conclusions, and should be respected and followed through upon by all parties including WHO. 

"The future origins tracing work should and can only be conducted on this basis instead of starting anew. The US politicizing of origins tracing only poisons the atmosphere of international cooperation on origins tracing and undermines global solidarity in fighting the epidemic, which will lead nowhere," Wang said.

Global Times