Asiapacific Security

Debate on Origins of COVID-19:

Impact and Implications

KB TEO

SYNOPSIS

Which country started the COVID-19 pandemic? Casualties are rising around the world. China and the US have accused each other. What is the truth?

COMMENTARY

David Stillwell, the top US diplomat for East Asia, delivered a very “stern representation” to China’s ambassador Cui Tiankai, a State Department official said, adding that Beijing’s envoy was “very defensive.”

The State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said China was seeking to deflect criticism of its role in “starting a global pandemic and not telling the world.”

“Spreading conspiracy theories is dangerous and ridiculous. We wanted to put the government on notice. We won’t tolerate it for the good of the Chinese people and the world,”, reported Reuters on 14/3/20.

Despite the signs of tension, US President Donald Trump praised Beijing last week for its “data sharing”.

Asked by a reporter during a White House news conference about “odd narratives” being offered by some Chinese officials, Trump appeared to brush off any concern, saying he had read one article on the subject, but that he did not think it was representative of his discussions with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Trump, who in a national address this week called the outbreak a “foreign virus” that started in China, added: “They know where it came from, we all know where it came from.”

Tensions escalated after Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian took to Twitter on Thursday.

“When did patient zero begin in the US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be the US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! The US owes us an explanation!” Zhao tweeted in English.

With the two year trade war between the economic superpowers still being sorted out, the Chinese and US governments have entered into a tit-for-tat exchange of blame for the origins of the Covid-19 virus this week.

Conspiracy theories have been fired back and forth between officials in the two countries. Washington has described the coronavirus outbreak as the “Wuhan Virus”. Even the US President has called it the “foreign virus”… “that started in China” during a nationwide address, reported Thaiger.

The diplomatic media spat comes as Chinese officials try to deflect blame for the origins of the contagion and reframe the narrative with China taking “decisive steps” to buy the world time by placing large sections of its population under quarantine. (This step was unprecedented at the time and never before attempted on a city-wide scale).

With cases swiftly falling in China (only 20 new cases announced in the past 24 hours whilst there were 3,497 new cases in Italy and 1,365 in Iran), Beijing is trying to re-imagine the widely held assessment that Wuhan, in Hubei province, is the birthplace of the outbreak.

Without any verifiable evidence, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian took to Twitter on Thursday claiming “it might be the US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan”.

The episode is the latest in an increasing war of words between Washington and Beijing, whose already strained ties over issues including trade, intellectual property rights and press freedom have further been tested by the virus outbreak.

The coronavirus, which emerged in China in December, has spread around the world, pummelling financial markets, halting industry, bringing some flights to a standstill, closing schools and forcing the postponement of sports events and concerts.

Zhao’s comments came days after Robert O’Brien, the US national security adviser, said China had reacted slowly to the coronavirus, probably costing the world two months when it could have been preparing.

Wuhan was ground zero for the outbreak, which the World Health Organisation this week labelled a pandemic. The virus has infected more than 127,000 people worldwide, including nearly 81,000 in mainland China, and killed more than 5000 people.

Beijing was criticised for initially attempting to censor some Chinese doctors who sounded an alarm over the virus. Since January, it has imposed severe containment measures, effectively locking down Wuhan and the surrounding Hubei province, home to 60 million people.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has complained that the US response had been hindered by what he called imperfect data from Beijing.

He and several other US politicians have angered Beijing by referring to the “Wuhan virus.” In a national address on Wednesday, President Donald Trump called the outbreak a “foreign virus” that started in China.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is a real place (that’s evidence enough for some), and the precise origin (as in date and location) of the novel coronavirus remains a mystery. Researchers continue to isolate the true origins but virologists who’ve parsed the genome, and epidemiologists who study coronaviruses, say they have enough evidence to emphatically prove that Covid-19 is brand new and came from nature, not the test tube of a rogue Chinese scientist.

Scientists have now conclusively cited the genome analyses from multiple countries, affirmed in The Lancet and other peer-review documents, that Covid-19 originated in wildlife.

Chinese authorities, after a slow start, eventually identified Wuhan and the rest of Hubei province as a threat so they placed some 50 million+ people under strict quarantine in an unprecedented effort to contain the epidemic.

But, probably in a face-saving action by the Chinese government to deflect accusations from their citizens on social media, began sowing doubts in late February. This is the time Zhong Nanshan, a respected consultant with the Chinese National Health Commission, told reporters “the epidemic first appeared in China, but didn’t necessarily originate in China.”

International scientists, however, have long suspected, and since provided evidence, that the virus jumped from an animal at the Wuhan market to a human before spreading globally. The prime suspects are either civet cats or bats.

The World Health Organisation has also stated that, while the exact pathway between its animal source and humans is still unclear, Covid-19 was “unknown before the outbreak began in Wuhan, China, in December 2019”.

Gerald Keusch, a professor of medicine and international health and associate director of Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, told Vox.com this week…

“Conspiracy theories about man-made viruses are not new. We saw this with HIV… the rumour that the US made it and introduced it into Africa. But they are really dangerous kinds of things to get spread around.”

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KB Teo is a former diplomat with the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He attended the UN General Assembly as part of the MFA delegation.