Editor's note: After 90 days "investigation," the U.S. intelligence community had no conclusion of where the coronavirus was from. Science-based, instead of political manipulated, origin tracing of COVID-19 is important for us to prevent and contain future outbreaks.

Where did COVID-19 come from? The question over its origins remains unanswered. In May 2021, instead of waiting for scientists' conclusions, U.S. President Joe Biden gave American intelligence agency 90 days to conclude where the virus came from. With the spread of the Delta variant in the U.S., the numbers of cases and deaths continue to rise with no sign of relief. More than 600,000 people have lost their lives, a number greater than the population of Baltimore.

African Americans and other minority groups have been hit hard by the pandemic.Blacks and Hispanics lag behind in getting vaccinated. Among people who have received at least one dose of the vaccine, nearly two thirds are white (58 percent), Hispanic people account for 17 percent, while blacks account for only 10 percent. While failing to control the virus within its border, the U.S. has made the virus flow outside its border. Between March and September 2020, the U.S. repatriated some 160,000 illegal immigrants. They were neither quarantined nor tested before being deported.

Over 23 million U.S. citizens went abroad via air and land ports between April 2020 and March 2021. A May 2020 report by Tel Aviv University in Israel indicated that indicated that nearly 70 percent of the strains of the confirmed cases in the country came from the U.S.

The U.S., a super spreader itself, is playing the old trick of blaming outsiders for the disease. This time, it has roped in the intelligence community to do so.

When Donald Trump was in office, the New York Times reported that his senior officials pressed espionage agencies to support the "lab-leak" hypothesis.  But till now, there is no evidence to support the argument of this former Secretary of State. Now it is Biden's turn. His inquiry order came after the Wall Street Journal published a report, fanning the speculation that the coronavirus might have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

This article sourced an undisclosed U.S. intelligence report, but also mentioned that there wasn't conclusive evidence for the "lab-leak" theory. Michael R. Gordon, the journalist who wrote the lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is also the author of this article. His last infamous article paved the way for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Where will his report lead the U.S. this time?

Even if the U.S. intelligence community had a clean history, people only need to look at the previous painstaking origin-tracing study done by international scientists to wonder if 90 days is enough for intelligence officials to provide a reliable answer. MERS, a viral respiratory disease caused by a novel coronavirus, was first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012. But the origins of the virus are not still fully understood. Ebola emerged in 1976. Though it is believed to be zoonotic in origin, the natural host is still unknown. And it took scientists 40 years to confirm that HIV/AIDS came from a type of chimpanzee in Central Africa.

But even then, there are still numerous mysteries around the virus, especially the reasons for its explosive appearance and rapid transformation into a global epidemic. If 40 years is not sufficient to construct the entire trajectory of a virus, how can 90 days be enough for a credible answer? HIV/AIDS was first identified in the U.S., but the country turned out not to be the origin of the virus. Is it a rare case? The first cases of the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic were reported in California and Texas. Studies showed that the virus originated in pigs from a very small region in central Mexico.

The current accepted source of the 1918 pandemic that infected one-third of the world's population, even though it is called the "Spanish flu", was Camp Funston, now Fort Riley, in central U.S. Could this novel coronavirus have been spreading quietly before it was identified by Chinese medics, like the 1918 pandemic?

In July 2019, NBC reported a respiratory illness outbreak at a northern Virginia living community of senior citizens. And then, there was a second one... And earlier traces of the SARS-CoV-2 virus were found in other places around the globe. Amirouche Hammar is a fish seller in France. On December 27, 2019, he went to a hospital near Paris because of a severe cold. In May 2020, when doctors tested his swab taken back in December 2019, the results were shocking.That was no normal cold. It was COVID-19.

Scientists are finding clues in the most unlikely places. Genetic traces of the virus have been identified in sewage samples collected way back in 2019 from places like Milan, Turin and Barcelona. And one more insight came this June. An analysis of blood samples from 24,000 Americans taken in early 2020 suggests that the new coronavirus popped up in the U.S. in December 2019 ― weeks before the cases were first officially recognized.

U.S. health officials are increasingly accepting the possibility that small numbers of COVID-19 infections may have occurred in the country even before the world became aware of a dangerous new virus. U.S. politicians, on the other hand, have turned a global public health disaster into a major power tussle by politicizing a scientific issue like the origin-tracing of the virus. As former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said: "The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions."

This group of international experts went to China in January for a joint study on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2. After 28 days of research, they concluded that the introduction of COVID-19 through an intermediate host is "likely to very likely," and introduction through a laboratory incident is "extremely unlikely." They have publicly called for any data supporting the lab-leak hypothesis to be published and submitted to the WHO. According to their article published in Nature on August 25, the WHO has received none so far.

Tracing the path of the virus, decoding genomes, finding treatments, creating vaccines... since the global pandemic broke out, scientists have been battling to control COVID-19. The uncertainty about future pandemics is not about if they will occur but rather, when, where and how. Biden's 90-day order is the very definition of politicizing the issue.

But tracing the origins of the novel coronavirus is not about one government or another, not about geopolitical competition. It is about ways and means that human beings can take to prevent and contain future outbreaks.

Scriptwriter: Wang Ying, Wang Naiqian, Xu Shuo, Chang Xiaolong

Video Editor: Liu Yuqing

Graphic Designer: Qi Haiming

Managing Editor: Chang Xiaolong, Wang Naiqian

Senior Producer: Wang Ying

Supervisor: Mei Yan

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