Sourabh Gupta, senior fellow of Institute for China-America Studies, says COVID-19 origins tracing should not be politicized.
The U.S. intelligence community reached an inconclusive assessment about the origins of the virus following a 90-day investigation ordered by President Joe Biden, according to an unclassified summary of the probe released on Friday.
The report which "tends to give an equivalence to all the various theories" is "in my view very unfair" and will be remembered as "something negative," Gupta said.
"Now what we are in fact having is a lack of political will to actually come together to deal with COVID-19. And the origins issue has hurt the political space to cooperate at a multilateral level and to deepen multilateral cooperation on global public health," said Gupta.
Gupta said what China has done in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is "incredibly commendable."
China's COVID response "has preserved human life. And I think it will, in the longer run, be a case study of how you deal with viruses," he said. "China has the global public health case study which will be written for posterity on how it needs to be followed."
"I think East Asia broadly, and China specifically, have done a great job. And this is really the model of how pandemics need to be dealt with in the future," he said.
Produced by Xinhua Global Service
