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BEIJING/WASHINGTON. – China on Wednesday criticized the US “politicization” of efforts to trace the origin of the coronavirus, demanding that American labs be investigated, ahead of the release of a US intelligence report on the virus.
The US report is intended to resolve disputes among intelligence agencies considering different theories about how the coronavirus emerged, including a once-dismissed theory about a Chinese laboratory accident.
“Scapegoating China cannot whitewash the US,” Fu Cong, director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ arms control department, told a briefing.
US President Joe Biden received a copy and was briefed on the classified report on Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Wednesday.
The intelligence community has been “working expeditiously” to prepare an unclassified version for the public, Psaki said without giving a timeline for its release.
US officials say they do not expect the review to lead to clear conclusion as to whether the coronavirus originated naturally or leaked from a laboratory.
Experts from various countries have said scientists should have a bigger say in the world’s quest for the truth about the origins of the pandemic, and not the intelligence community.
China has said a laboratory leak was highly unlikely, and it has ridiculed a theory that coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, the city where Covid-19 infections emerged in late 2019, setting off the pandemic.
Beijing has instead suggested that the virus slipped out of a lab at the US Army’s Fort Detrick base in Maryland in 2019.
“It is only fair that if the US insists that this is a valid hypothesis, they should do their turn and invite the investigation into their labs,” Fu said.
Fu denied that China is engaging in a disinformation campaign.
He said that if other parties insist on pursuing the lab leak theory, then the WHO team of researchers should visit Fort Detrick. He portrayed it as a fairness issue since the WHO has been to the Wuhan institute twice.
“If Dr Tedros (WHO director-general) believes that we should not rule out the hypothesis of a lab leak, well, he knows where to go. He needs to go to the US labs.”
China notes that Fort Detrick’s infectious disease institute has studied coronaviruses and that it was closed for several months in 2019-20 for safety violations.
A joint WHO-China report earlier this year concluded that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely,” and China wants the investigation to move on to other possibilities.
The most likely scenario, the report said, is that the virus jumped from bats to another animal that then infected humans.
On Wednesday, the Chinese embassy in Washington posted the calls for World Health Organization investigations at Fort Detrick and at the University of North Carolina to its website after it said US media had rejected its editorial submissions.
And on Tuesday, China’s envoy to the United Nations asked the head of the WHO for an investigation into US labs. – Reuters.
Peter Tanyanyiwa
Online Reporter