Sino-US viral war

 US President Donald Trump said claimed that U.S. intelligence officials were investigating whether the novel coronavirus began spreading after an accident at a Chinese high-security biomedical laboratory in Wuhan. Many in the liberal media were sceptical about it pointing out that Trump offered no evidence supporting that scenario. Such an allegation needs to be substantiated and China has to accept the challenge by inviting the world’s scientists to the country to carry out independent investigation in its laboratories. Without that all allegations would never lead to conclusions , which ultimately may never resolve questions that have surfaced. On the other hand, China’s lack of transparency over its COVID-19 outbreak has helped give oxygen to theories about the origin of the virus. Beijing has clouded and revised information about its infections and deaths and detained medical workers who blew the whistle over concerns about China’s handling of its response. A media agency found China didn’t inform the public about the virus for nearly a week, enabling it to spread undetected at a vital moment. China’s foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao has also pushed a false counter-narrative that coronavirus originated with the U.S. military. That tit-for-tat between the Chinese and Americans does no justice to the need for answers. There has to be some explanation about how the Wuhan virus, which was later modified by a pro-China WHO as COVID-19, became what it is today- a Frankenstein out of control. One of the views was that COVID-19 originated from bats. However in a March 11,2020 interview with Scientific American, Shi Zhengli, one of China’s leading experts on bat coronaviruses and deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said that when her team sequenced the genome of the new coronavirus in Wuhan it did not match any of the bat coronaviruses her laboratory had previously collected and studied. A research paper by a group of Chinese scientists published in January by The Lancet, a well-respected British medical journal, revealed the first COVID-19 patient, identified on December 1,2019 had no apparent connection to Wuhan’s wet market. Nor did about a third of the initial large cluster of confirmed cases, a revelation that’s raised eyebrows. There are many views, several from the scientific community about the origin of the virus which was known to Chinese virologists. The views suggest that the Chinese had done some experiments with a SARS-like virus by altering its genetic make up. If that is true, then speculations that the COVID-19 also contains code of HIV-like gene or strands of other deadly diseases cannot also be ruled out. China is also countering the US charge by alleging that the virus was engineered in the US and later spread to China from an American cyclist. While spreading conspiracy theories-stories involving claims that shadowy, powerful interests have secretly engineered events to their own advantage- is a time-honored ploy by which states try to discredit their rivals, the first global pandemic of the social-media era shows just how efficiently wild theories can travel. These need to be ascertained for the sake and future of the entire world now facing a pandemic and with no vaccine to treat the more than 24 lakh cases.