By Charles Onunaiju

DESPITE concerted efforts, the COVID-19 pandemic, which has ravaged the world for more than a year, is still much around. But its days appeared numbered as many arsenals are sharpened against it, including vaccines that are now available, though currently unevenly distributed. Sub-Saharan Africa, though mercifully with low fatalities from the vicious virus, is even lower on the map of global vaccine distribution.

However, even before the virus is contained and possibly consigned, the insidious virus of politically- motivated finger-pointing in tracing its origins appears in full swing. The United States, which scored poorly among major countries in the control and containment of the pandemic, especially at its peak last year, is wagging its finger, turning the origin-tracing saga from genuine scientific inquiry, where it should properly belong, to another cold war ideological armoury to besmirch China, a country reputed to have done the most to contain the pandemic and also put its experience in bludgeoning the vile virus in the global public domain.

Some conscientious scientists consisting “group of physicians, veterinarians, epidemiologists, virologist, biologists, ecologists and public health experts from around the world”, writing in the highly regarded British scientific journal, The Lancet, warned that “it is time to turn down the heat of the rhetoric and turn up the light of scientific inquiry, if we are to be better prepared to stem the next pandemic, whenever it comes and where it begins”. And the rhetoric is the President Biden’s administration bid to refloat the earlier discredited gossip that the virus may have accidentally escaped from a laboratory, with the ulterior motive to make China’s top virology laboratory in Wuhan as the prospective scapegoat.

But the scientists, under reference, in their working view have expressed that: “SARS-COV-2(COVID-19) most likely originated from nature and not in laboratory on the basis of early genetic analysis of the new virus and well-established evidence from previous emerging infectious diseases, including the coronavirus that cause the common cold as well as the original Sars-Cov and Mers-Cov.”

They further clarified that “the most critical question to address now is how did the SARS-COV-2 reach the human population,” because, according to them, “such insights will drive what the world must urgently do to prevent another tragedy like COVID-19”. They added that “the strongest clue from new, credible and peer-reviewed evidence in scientific literature is that the virus evolved in nature, while suggestions of a laboratory leak source of the pandemic remains without scientifically validated evidence that directly supports it in peer-reviewed scientific journals.”

Warning that “allegations and conjecture are of no help,” the scientists opined that “recriminations have not, and will not encourage international cooperation and collaborations, …to facilitate access to information and objective assessment of the pathway from a bat virus to a human pathogen that might help to prevent a future pandemic”.

Despite the groundswell of considerable scientific consensus of the most likely origin of the virus that caused the pandemic, a politically- motivated blame game originating from the Joe Biden administration in the United States is well underway. A fairy tale conjecture suitable only for its ideological and political purpose and with premeditated outcome, ahead of conclusive scientific enquiry is been spurned in the public domain.

This is not helpful and will rob mankind of adequate understanding of the trigger of the malicious and vile virus that has caused humanity of untold sorrows.

Earlier this year, a World Health Organisation-led delegation visited China and determined that a laboratory leak was an “extremely unlikely pathway”, and concluded that the virus most likely jumped from animals to humans, probably from bats to an intermediate animal.

But some American politicians have been escalating the politically- motivated rumour that the virus escaped from a laboratory. In June, Marco Rubio, US Republican senator introduced the so-called COVID Act of 2021, whose ulterior aim is to bring pressure on the leadership of the Chinese Academy of Science. At the very start of the outbreak of the virus, the American leadership, notwithstanding the status of the country as a global leader in medical technology, allowed political manipulation to override epidemic control, leading to the infection of 35 million Americans and the loss of lives of more than 600,000.

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The former US President, Mr. Donald Trump, notorious for calling the virus “Chinese virus”, hopelessly trivialised the virus, including his outlandish remark of ‘sun-bathing’ and even the ridiculous do-nothing approach, when he suggested that the virus would somehow just disappear. This behaviour of the US leadership to trivialise and politicise the virus even at the early stage of the outbreak gave impetus to its spread and the attendant heavy fatalities in the US.

The current US leadership has escalated the rhetoric about origin-tracing of the virus and accusing China of lacking transparency; but it appears that Washington rhetoric is smokescreen to cover the shocking failure in epidemic control and containment, which showed the US ruling circles were more interested in political and ideological goal-scoring than science-led inquiry in tracing the origins of the virus.

While wagging fingers at the Chinese laboratory in the city of Wuhan, the United States has not mentioned or demonstrated any concern about the US Army medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease at Fort Detrick.  An outbreak of disease with similar COVID-19 symptoms happened just after the lab’s serious safety accident in 2019. Though, pointing accusing fingers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the US is, however, the world’s largest funder of coronavirus research.

At the University of North Carolina in particular, Dr. Ralph Baric’s team has long developed coronavirus synthesis and a wide-ranging origin-tracing of the virus, should definitely include investigation of these US facilities. Despite that the COVID-19 is still wreaking havoc, escalating rhetoric and trading barbs on its origins is the least the world can afford now. China demonstrated a high sense of responsibility when its scientists published the genetic sequencing of the virus barely a month following the outbreak of the disease in Wuhan and instituted the most rigorous lockdown of its city of 11 million people, in a bid to contain the spread of the disease.

Had the American leadership and other Western countries then taken a cue from China’s rigorous epidemic control measures, extended support and refrained from stigmatisation, the virus may be have been contained much earlier. They chorused that China lockdown was rights abuses of citizens but would later imposed even more harsher lockdowns. 

The group of scientists who wrote in The Lancet Science journal, insisting that “science, not speculation is essential to determine how SARs-Cov2 reached humans”, also reaffirmed their expression of solidarity with those in China who confronted the outbreak… and worked to exhaustion and at personal risk, in the relentless and continuing battle against the virus.”

For developing countries, and especially Africa, while tracing the origins of the virus is essential, the control and containment of the pandemic is of utmost concern, and China’s support with materials and practical experience-sharing in pandemic control has been of tremendous value and unforgettable.

Onunaiju is research director of an Abuja-based Think Tank

Vanguard News Nigeria