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On Tuesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) released its interim report on the origins of COVID-19.
This landmark report, released more than a year after the emergence of a deadly new virus that changed lives around the world, is a major contribution to the collective knowledge of humanity and to the struggle of science and medicine against disease, suffering and death.
The report is based on the collective efforts of thousands of scientists, in hundreds of countries on all inhabited continents. It was the product of an international investigative team bringing together the world’s leading researchers from China, the United States, Russia, Japan, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia, Vietnam and Qatar.
During and after their fact-finding trip to China, the researchers examined thousands of samples from Wuhan hospitals, death data for millions of people dating back years, tens of thousands of patient records, tens thousands of animal and wildlife samples, and the sequences of many related viruses found primarily in bats.
The report deals a devastating blow to the efforts of the American ruling class to promote the lie that the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan. He outright rejects the claim that COVID-19 was developed as a biological weapon, concluding that it “has been ruled out by other scientists as a result of genome analyzes.”
WHO has considered the possibility of a laboratory leak. But he dismissed the possibility as “extremely unlikely”, saying: “There are no records of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 in any laboratory before December 2019, or of genomes which, in combination, could provide a SARS-CoV-2 genome. “
Instead, the report found that COVID-19 most likely originated from a bat population – or potentially another animal – before going through a series of animal intermediates to infect humans. While the report acknowledges that the first major outbreak occurred in Wuhan, China, and most cases clustered around the Hua’nan wet market, it did not conclude that Wuhan or the market – or even China moreover – were the source of the disease.
The report examines the closest relatives of the SARS-Cov-2 virus that causes COVID-19, most of which are bat viruses but some of which have been identified in pangolins, as well as the closest human virus , SARS-Cov, which caused the SARS pandemic of the early 2000s. Although these viruses closely resemble the virus that causes COVID-19, the differences between them suggest that another animal may have mediated .
Committee member Dr Peter Daszak said the report is a “testament” to how “countries can come together to focus on the origins of emerging diseases. And viruses don’t think about national borders. Daszak has made repeated statements denouncing the efforts to blame the virus outbreak on a Chinese lab.
The report and the press conference that followed underscored that the investigation was ongoing. The WHO has requested a massive data set, consisting of the private health records of 76,000 people with influenza-like illnesses by December, which China has yet to provide, but which scientists said they hope to review during the next stage of the investigation.
“In China, as in many other countries, there are restrictions on privacy laws that prohibit the sharing of data, including private details,” said team leader Ben Embarek. “It will be exactly the same in most countries of the world, if we go there to study and have done a lot of studies in the past, and we still face the same challenges.”
While the findings of the scientific inquiry are clear, the effort to blame the virus outbreak on China is a strategic imperative for the ruling class internationally.
The WHO, the United Nations public health agency, is itself under immense pressure from the great capitalist powers to maintain the lie. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus sought to soften the report’s findings, issuing a statement Tuesday saying: “While the lab leak is the least likely hypothesis, it requires further investigation.” Tedros added that “all assumptions remain on the table”.
The report itself, however, entirely destroys the scientific credibility of the Biden administration, which promoted the false conspiracy theory that the disease could have been freed from a laboratory in China, initially promoted by Trump.
The Biden administration immediately condemned the study, with spokesperson Jen Psaki falsely saying it “did not lead us to better understanding or knowledge than what we had six to nine months ago. on the origin ”. Another statement from the United States and its closest allies, including India, Japan and the United Kingdom, claimed that the report “did not have access to complete and original data and samples.”
There are two interrelated considerations behind the “Wuhan laboratory” lie. First, the ruling elites of the great capitalist powers want to blame the pandemic for their own catastrophic policies, responsible for large-scale death, on China.
Last weekend, CNN released a report on the US response to the pandemic which made it clear that nearly all of the US response to the pandemic was dictated not by the defense of human lives, but rather by self-interest. economics of the financial elite. As a result, more people have died from COVID-19 in the United States than in any other country. Desperate to blame it and create an outside enemy, the US media and the Biden administration are repeating Trump’s maxim: “It’s China’s fault!”
Second, the “Wuhan laboratory” lie is linked to the geopolitical imperatives of US imperialism. The Biden administration is leading a massive military escalation against China, seeking to strike the country with offensive missiles and doubling US military spending in the Pacific. Three decades of endless war by the American ruling class in the Middle East and Central Asia is turning into a “great power” conflict, targeting its main competitors, including China.
All wars in history have been preceded by such systematic propaganda demonization. One of the consequences of this propaganda is the significant growth in anti-Asian violence in the United States and around the world.
Humanity in the 21st century is making massive scientific breakthroughs, creating the possibility of ridding the world of suffering, poverty and disease. But the capitalist order feeds and feeds on fanaticism, ignorance, racism and xenophobia, wasting vast social resources not only on the wealth of the oligarchy, but on murderous wars capable of totally destroying human society. . If human progress is to prevail, capitalism must be abolished by an international movement of the working class for socialism.
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