The COVID-19 origin-tracing work should not be politicized, said Dr Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), citing examples of previous virus tracing.
Gao expressed his opinion during the 23rd Annual Meeting of the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) that opened on Tuesday, with the example of another coronavirus named "HCoV-HKU1."
The virus was first extracted in 2004 by microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung in the University of Hong Kong. But scientists in Brazil later found that they had a sample of the same virus dating back to the 1990s.
"They tested their samples in the fridge from 1995 and found the HCoV-HKU1," he told the meeting. "The virus has already infected humans in that year."
Gao said this example is the reason behind his multiple calling to the world that origin-tracing is a scientific work that should not be politicized.
"No one should play the blaming game," he said.
The Biden administration is using the Intelligence Community to find out if COVID-19 was leaked from a lab in Wuhan. The World Health Organization is planning to launch the second phase of its origin-tracing mission even after the international team concluded that lab leak theory is extremely unlikely to be true.
The Chinese government, especially the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has said multiple times in recent months that the origin-tracing should be done not only in China but also other countries with possibilities.
Research papers from around the world, including the U.S., France, Brazil, Italy, Japan and Spain, have revealed traces of COVID-19 before it was first identified in Wuhan at the end of 2019.
Many other papers are calling the world to refrain from the cost-heavy work of origin-tracing and go back to the right track of producing and distributing COVID vaccines.
The CAST meeting also featured keynote speeches from other top Chinese sci-tech icons. Pan Jianwei, a pioneer of quantum communication technology, said he wished to build a global quantum-based network in 10 to 15 years and start solving real-world problems with quantum computing in five years.
(Sun Ye also contributed to the story.)
