- US President Joe Biden said that China has withheld important information about the origin of Covid-19.
- Previously, US intelligence agencies said they did not believe that the new coronavirus is a biological weapon.
- However, few members of the US intelligence community believe that the virus may have escaped from the laboratory.
President Biden said on Friday that after the U.S. intelligence community expressed its disbelief that the virus was a biological weapon, China had withheld “critical information” about the origin of Covid-19-but there were still disagreements over whether it had escaped from the laboratory.
However, according to an unclassified summary of a long-awaited intelligence report, the United States does not believe that Chinese officials predicted the virus before the pandemic first broke out, which has now claimed 4.5 million lives.
Biden said in a statement:
The key information about the origin of the epidemic is in the People’s Republic of China, but from the beginning, Chinese government officials have been working hard to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from obtaining this information. To this day, China continues to reject calls for transparency and conceal information, even though the death toll from this epidemic continues to rise.
U.S. intelligence agencies have ruled out that the coronavirus was developed as a weapon, and most agencies have assessed that it is not genetic engineering with “low confidence.”
However, the community is still divided on the origin of the pathogen. Four agencies and the National Intelligence Committee believe that the possible explanation is natural contact with animals as a possible explanation, and one agency supports the laboratory leakage theory.
Analysts at the three institutions could not draw conclusions.
The summary said: “The difference in analytical views mainly stems from how institutions measure intelligence reports and scientific publications, as well as intelligence and science gaps.”
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It added that the intelligence community and global scientists lacked clinical samples or epidemiological data on the earliest Covid-19 cases.
Biden said that the United States will continue to cooperate with allies and urge Beijing to share more information and cooperate with the World Health Organization.
“We must give a comprehensive and transparent account of this global tragedy. Nothing is acceptable,” he said.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated that, given the historical nature of the pandemic and the importance of informing the public while protecting its sources and methods, it will review the declassified part of the report in the near future.
Laboratory leaks fade
A heavily politicized visit by a WHO team in January also proved fruitless, and was criticized for lack of transparency and access. Beijing rejected calls from the United States and other countries for a new origin investigation.
In a statement on Friday, the Chinese Embassy in Washington lashed out at the findings of the US intelligence community, defending its handling of the pandemic and the WHO investigation.
The embassy said in a statement:
Reports from the US intelligence community show that the United States insists on taking the wrong path of political manipulation. The intelligence community’s report is based on China’s presumption of guilt, and it is only intended to be a scapegoat for China.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the hypothesis of natural origin—that the virus appeared in bats and then might be transmitted to humans through intermediate species—was widely accepted.
But over time, scientists have been unable to find viruses that match SARS-CoV-2 genetic characteristics in bats or other animals. Researchers said that they are more willing to consider the leakage of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which carries bats. Coronavirus research.
However, recent scientific papers are turning the debate back on the origin of zoonotic diseases.
Researchers from China and the University of Glasgow published a paper in the journal Science that found that “animal-to-human transmission of infected live animals is the most likely cause of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
In addition, a paper published in the journal Cell by 21 top virologists bluntly concluded: “There is currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has laboratory origin.”
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