Why Fort Detrick research remains a secret

"A deep investigation of everything that happened at Fort Detrick would be interesting indeed, but difficult for reasons of secrecy," said Stephen Kinzer, senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

"Fort Detrick is an enormous complex; it has been for decades the center of American military research related to biology... some of what's going on there a secret. For a long time, people were coming out, protesting outside the gates of Fort Detrick for projects of which we don't know the nature," Kinzer, a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, told Xinhua in a recent interview.

Kinzer's remarks come amid growing support to advance the study of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 globally and opposition to politicizing the origins issue.