https://www.wral.com/coronavirus/controversial-virus-research-seen-both-as-groundbreaking-reckless/19098107/
◆The United States is the biggest sponsor and experimenter of gain-of-function studies on coronaviruses in the world. The method of chimeric virus required for the gain-of-function experiment is the exclusive patent of Baric, and the auxiliary software and gene comparison equipment required for this technology are also unique to the United States. Anyone who uses the technology needs to obtain authorization and will leave traces. Baric has mastered a method to modify and even enhance coronavirus through reverse genetic technique. According to MIT Technology Review, with the help of this technique, Baric can not only "bring an actual virus to life from its genetic code," but also "mix and match parts of multiple viruses" to create a new one.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/
◆Baric has collaborated closely with two institutes at Fort Detrick involving in research on high-risk viruses, including coronaviruses, which are the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick (IRF-Frederick). A large number of scientific papers showed that Baric has conducted many studies about coronaviruses with the USAMRIID. In a paper carried by Nature in 2018, Lisa Torzewski, a researcher at the Fort Detrick Complex Research Facility, worked with Baric to infect some monkeys with genetically modified MERS viruses.
◆Lisa Hensley, one of Baric's students, was a scientist with the USAMRIID. She worked with Baric for many times and later joined IRF-Frederick as the deputy director of this U.S. government research institution. Baric's rich resources on coronaviruses and his technique of transforming and creating the viruses have been widely used in Fort Detrick through those cooperation and contacts. However, the USAMRIID, IRF-Frederick and even Baric's own laboratory at the University of North Carolina in the United States all had bad safety records, and they are all directly related to P4 laboratories engaging in the research of the most dangerous viruses.
5.The United States has the most advanced medical technology and the most complete medical system in the world, but it has become one of the countries with the largest number of confirmed cases and virus-related deaths, which fully reflects the country's impotent response to the epidemic.
◆The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on Jan. 30, 2020, but the United States did not declare a national emergency until March 13 that year. While many countries encountering the COVID-19 outbreaks concurrently with the United States have effectively controlled the epidemic, the situation in the United States is still worsening. Although the United States stays far away from Wuhan, the capital of central China's Hubei Province, the country has been lagging far behind the neighboring provinces of Hubei in epidemic prevention and control.
In contrast to China's response to the epidemic, the U.S. government squandered 70 days before declaring a national emergency until March 13, though it was notified by China of the new virus on Jan. 3. If counting from Feb. 2, when the United States closed its border to all Chinese citizens and foreign nationals who had traveled in China within the previous 14 days, 40 days had been wasted before March 13.
◆On Oct. 7, 2020, U.S. media quoted an internal government memo as saying that the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 related to the White House had risen to 34, and that the source of the infection was probably the Supreme Court nomination ceremony held by then U.S. President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden of the White House on Sept. 26, which was defined as a "super-spreading event." There are videos and photos showing that less than a third of people attending the event wore face masks, and almost no one maintained safe social distancing.
On Oct. 8, 2020, the New England Journal of Medicine said in an editorial that leaders of the United States have failed the test produced by the COVID-19 crisis, and they "have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy."
In October 2020, the Independent Task Force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, a well-known U.S. think tank, released a special report titled "Improving Pandemic Preparedness: Lessons from COVID-19," which reflected on the problems and defects in the U.S. response to the pandemic. The report said that the U.S. government "lacks a strong focal point and expertise at the White House for ensuring pandemic readiness and coordinating an effective response," adding that "despite intelligence and public health warnings of an imminent pandemic," the country did not "act quickly enough in mobilizing a coherent nationwide response, wasting precious weeks that could otherwise have been used to implement a nationwide strategy and capacity for testing and contact tracing to identify new infections and reduce their spread."
Without clear federal guidance, "many states relaxed these public health measures prematurely, resulting in new spikes," the report said, mentioning that the Trump administration was in error in terms of public health risk communication. The report continued that U.S. officials failed to offer the public "clear, reliable, and science-based information about the risk of infection; to adequately defend public health officials against harassment and personal attacks; and to release timely guidance on the utility of the public health measures implemented to combat the spread of the disease."
The report said the COVID-19 pandemic showed "tremendous confusion over the respective responsibilities" of federal, state, local, and tribal governments, adding that the pandemic exposed "the nation's inadequate investment in state and local health systems." There is a lack of coordination in the U.S. and global pandemic preparedness and response, said the report, adding that the pandemic "has exposed the lack of a multilateral mechanism to encourage the joint development and globally equitable distribution of lifesaving vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics." Besides, the pandemic revealed "the limitations of existing national and global systems of epidemic threat surveillance and assessment, which left public health officials and researchers without access to timely data," it wrote.
◆In August 2021, Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, Taihe Think Tank and Intellisia Institute jointly released a research report entitled "'America Ranked First'? ! The Truth about America's Fight against COVID-19." The report said the United States is a "failed country in fighting the pandemic," which resorted to covering up the truth using anti-science and common sense fallacies, politicizing, and using monetary measures to fight the pandemic. During the process, the wealth of the rich has "ballooned," whereas the lives of ordinary people have "deteriorated," said the report, continuing that the U.S. society has been "torn apart and racial tensions have intensified." The U.S. federal system under the partisan contest "failed to take on responsibilities, giving prevarications at different levels," which constituted a "Disunited America" image in the fight against the pandemic, said the report.
The United States, the report said, has an unshirkable responsibility for the global spread of the pandemic, because in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, more than 20 million U.S. citizens traveled abroad. In addition, the United States exported less than one percent of its vaccine production by practicing "vaccine nationalism," said the report. Besides a refusal to international vaccine cooperation, Washington has engaged in "virus origin tracing terrorism," putting the presumption of guilt against other countries, and disrupted the international order of pandemic responses by "withdrawing from the WHO and rejoining the WHO." (more)
