BEIJING, Nov. 6 (Xinhua) -- For some time, various lies and rumors concocted by the U.S. side against China on origins tracing have been repeatedly refuted by China and the international community with detailed facts and data.
So far, more than 80 countries and over 300 political parties, social organizations and think tanks have opposed the politicization of COVID-19 origins tracing in various ways.
The U.S. intelligence department recently released a declassified version of its assessment report on COVID-19 origins. Continuously disregarding science-based origins tracing, the report insinuated that "the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences leaked the virus", and accused China of lacking transparency and obstructing international investigations.
Origins tracing is a scientific matter, yet the U.S. side is using intelligence agencies to trace the origins, and peddling the old lies that have been refuted under a cloak of intelligence. Washington's real purpose is attempting to confuse the public and deceive the world, and continuing to seek a "presumption of guilt" against China, politicize the origins tracing, shift the blame onto China, and suppress and contain it.
Based on the so-called U.S. investigation report and public materials of all parties, the Chinese side once again lists all kinds of vicious slanders concocted by the U.S. side on COVID-19 origins tracing, and presents to the international community facts and the truth, so the plots and tricks of "politicizing origins tracing" and "origins tracing by the intelligence community" can be exposed.
Part One
U.S. vicious slanders on China over COVID-19 origins tracing and the truth
Disregarding science and facts, the United States has fabricated lies, and smeared and criticized China. China has put people's life safety and health first, decisively launched an all-out war against the pandemic, and adopted "hard core" prevention and control measures that are the most comprehensive, stringent and thorough, which have effectively blocked the chain of virus transmission.
Upholding the vision of building a global community of health for all, China has informed the international community of the outbreak as soon as possible, shared its experience in epidemic prevention, control and treatment with all parties without reservation, provided anti-epidemic assistance within its capacity, and taken the lead in launching the world's largest vaccine cooperation, making an outstanding contribution to global public health security.
China has always adhered to a scientific attitude and actively participated in the global cooperation in science-based origins tracing, and twice invited the World Health Organization (WHO) experts to China to carry out COVID-19 origins tracing studies, in order to make China's contribution to mankind's final defeat of the pandemic.
1. On the U.S. claim that clusters of COVID-19 cases first appeared in Wuhan
Vicious slander 1: The earliest cluster of COVID-19 cases arose in Wuhan, China in December 2019.
Facts and truth: A growing number of clues, reports and studies have indicated that COVID-19 cases emerged in many places around the world as early as in the second half of 2019. The outbreak in the United States occurred earlier than the officially confirmed case. A study by Italian research institutes has revealed that the virus may have circulated in Italy as early as in late summer 2019.
◆On Dec. 27, 2019, Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine reported cases of pneumonia of unknown cause to Wuhan Jianghan Center for Disease Prevention and Control. From Jan. 3, 2020, China began to regularly inform the World Health Organization, relevant countries including the United States, and China's Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan of the outbreak.
In January 2021, the WHO-convened global study of origins of SARS-CoV-2 said that there was no indication of the transmission of the novel coronavirus before December 2019 in Wuhan, adding it was considered unlikely that any substantial transmission of SARS-CoV-2 was occurring in Wuhan in October or November 2019.
◆The U.S. National Institutes of Health's analysis of more than 24,000 stored blood samples of U.S. citizens contributed to the agency in the first three months of 2020 suggested that the virus that causes COVID-19 was present in the United States as far back as December 2019, weeks before first U.S. cases were officially confirmed.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-offers-new-evidence-early-sars-cov-2-infections-us
A joint study by the University of California--Los Angeles and the University of Washington showed that the number of patients with respiratory symptoms and diseases from late December 2019 to February 2020 has increased significantly, indicating the virus had already spread in U.S. communities before the country had clinical awareness and testing capabilities.
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/covid-may-have-been-in-la-as-early-as-december-2019
In March 2020, then U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield publicly acknowledged at a House committee hearing that some COVID-19 deaths have been diagnosed as flu-related in the United States. The U.S. side said it would conduct a nationwide retrospective investigation and study across the country.
In May 2020, Michael Melham, mayor of Belleville in the U.S. state of New Jersey, said he had probably been infected with the virus in November 2019, and that test results showed COVID-19 antibodies had been present in his body for a long time.
https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1666192464336468320&wfr=spider&for=pc
In May 2020, USA Today reported that 171 people in Florida showed symptoms of COVID-19 as early as in January 2020 and none of them reported any travel experience to China, two months before the first confirmed COVID-19 cases were officially recorded in the state.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/05/patients-florida-had-symptoms-covid-19-early-january/3083949001/
In June 2021, News Medical cited a study to report that COVID-19 reactive antibodies were present in 106 residual archived samples from routine blood donations that were collected in nine U.S. states between Dec. 13, 2019 and Jan. 17, 2020, and among them 84 samples exhibited neutralizing activity.
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210621/Study-shows-that-COVID-19-was-present-in-five-states-in-December-2019-even-before-the-first-reported-case-in-China.aspx
In July 2021, U.S. Department of Agriculture reported on its website that its Plant Health Inspection Service recently completed a study, which showed that antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 were detected in 33 percent of the 481 white-tailed deer serum samples collected from January 2020 through 2021 in Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania states, and among them 67 percent of samples collected in Michigan contained antibodies. This was the first detection of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in wildlife, and the presence of the antibodies confirmed that a large number of white-tailed deer in the United States have already been exposed to the virus. The study also showed that SARS-CoV-2 antibodies were detected in one of the 143 samples collected before January 2020, which means that the virus infections occurred in white-tailed deer populations in the country as early as in 2019.
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/newsroom/stakeholder-info/stakeholder-messages/wildlife-damage-news/deer-sars
In August 2021, the Mercury News, a daily of San Jose, California, published an exclusive report revealing that COVID-19 was present in the United States as early as December or even November 2019, and caused many deaths in early January 2020. These early deaths occurred in different U.S. states, some of which were in remote locations where local residents barely had any physical contacts with China. Experts have said a deeper analysis of early deaths in the United States is needed.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/08/22/exclusive-first-u-s-covid-deaths-came-earlier-and-in-different-places-than-previously-thought/
Both The Palm Beach Post and The Miami Herald revealed that the Florida Department of Health posted on its website data of 171 patients who had experienced COVID-19 symptoms in January and February 2020 or eventually tested positive for the virus, but these data were once deleted for unexplained reasons.
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/20200506/coronavirus-florida-without-explanation-state-puts-early-symptom-data-back-online
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article242851256.html
Many comments on U.S. social media posted in the first half of 2020 indicated that nearly more than 200 people in the United States or countries having close ties with the United States said people they knew or they themselves had been suspected to be infected with the virus as early as in November 2019, with COVID-19-like symptoms, and all these are real foreign netizens.
Ado Paglinawan, a former press attache at the Philippine embassy in Washington, released a book entitled "No Vaccine for a Virus Called Racism," in which he sorted out the timeline of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States and made the judgment that the disease started in June 2019 in the United States and later spread across the world.
In September 2021, ChinaXiv, an online publishing service operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, published a study on dating the origins of COVID-19 based on big data modeling and analysis. The researchers set up an optimized model using the epidemic transmission model and big-data analysis method, and inferred the dates of the first infection cases in 12 northeastern U.S. states and in China's Wuhan City and Zhejiang Province, based on published data. The result indicated that, for the 12 U.S. states, the possible dates of the first infection, with a probability of 50 percent, fall mostly between August and October 2019, while the earliest is April 26, 2019 on Rhode Island, and the latest is Nov. 30, 2019 in Delaware. All of the dates indicated by the data are earlier than Jan. 20, 2020, the officially announced date of the first confirmed case in the United States, showing that the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States started to spread around September 2019 with a high confidence probability.
http://chinaxiv.org/abs/202109.00058 (more)
