US sees much to gain from politicizing pandemic, says LatAm analyst

MEXICO CITY -- The United States is benefiting in more ways than one from politicizing the COVID-19 pandemic and alleging the virus leaked from a Chinese lab, according to a Panama-based international observer.

In an article that asks "who politicizes the pandemic and refuses to investigate its origin?", Julio Yao Villalaz said, "the US has not submitted to the scrutiny of the international community, and does not allow its 200 secret biological laboratories to be investigated."

The article, published earlier this month on Alainet, a news and editorial website of the Latin American Information Agency, spotlights the fact that investigations have already discredited the Wuhan "lab leak" theory, and that the United States' insistence on blaming China has harmed global efforts to rein in the virus.

"Politicization of the pandemic, which includes a broad-spectrum anti-China racist campaign, has caused great damage worldwide, especially to China and the US itself, because it diverts attention from responsibility for (looking for) its origin," said the analyst, who is also honorary president and president-in-charge of Panama's Center for Asian Strategic Studies.

"The facts show that the US, under President Donald Trump, politicized the pandemic against China from the beginning to ally the world against Beijing, make it pay for global damage and stop the vertiginous development of China, which the US sees as a threat to its hegemony," Yao Villalaz said.

Investigators should be given access to US laboratories, such as "the microbial laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the main center of the biological weapons program of the US Army Medical Command, (which) abruptly closed in August 2019," said Yao Villalaz.

"If China allowed them (the labs) to be scrupulously examined, why can't the US?" he asked.