China on Wednesday criticized the United States for “politicizing” efforts to trace the source Coronavirus diseaseBefore the United States releases an intelligence report on the virus, it is required to conduct investigations in American laboratories without any evidence.
This U.S. report aims to resolve disputes between intelligence agencies, taking into account different theories about how the coronavirus emerged, including theories about China’s laboratory accidents that have been rejected.
“Stopping China cannot whitewash the United States,” Fu Cong, director of the Arms Control Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a briefing.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Wednesday that US President Joe Biden received a copy on Tuesday and was briefed on the confidential report.
Psaki said that the intelligence community has been “working quickly” to prepare a non-confidential version for the public, but did not give a release timeline.
US officials said that after China’s earlier international efforts to collect critical information on the ground were blocked, they did not expect the review to draw clear conclusions.
China stated that the possibility of laboratory leaks is small and mocked a theory that the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, where COVID-19 infection occurred at the end of 2019, triggering a pandemic.
Instead, Beijing hinted that the virus leaked from the U.S. Army’s laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland in 2019.
“It’s fair to say that if the United States insists that this is a valid hypothesis, it should be their turn to invite their laboratory to investigate,” Fu said.
Fu said that China did not participate in false propaganda activities.
The fringe ideas once put forward by individual Chinese officials — lacking any public evidence — have become a topic for the Chinese government as it seeks to divert criticism of its possible role in the origin of the virus.
On Wednesday, the Chinese Embassy in Washington posted a call on its website for the World Health Organization to conduct investigations at Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina after saying that the American media had rejected its editorial submissions.
On Tuesday, the Chinese envoy to the United Nations asked the head of the WHO to conduct an investigation into the American laboratory.
A joint WHO-China team visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but the United States expressed concern about access to the investigation.
A senior U.S. government official said: “The early stages of the pandemic occurred irrefutably in China, but China continues to confuse the public and deny the international community the access it needs,” he added, if future pandemics originate from The United States, it will insist on a “rapid and transparent” assessment.
Republicans in the United States claimed to have “evidence” leaking COVID-19 from a Chinese laboratory.This is what we know
“If the US investigation has reasonable and technically credible reasons, we will certainly support it. But no,” said the official, who asked not to be named.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio believes that the Chinese laboratory’s leak is reasonable, and in a statement he urged the Biden administration to immediately declassify the report.
Rubio said: “The American people should know what our government has done and don’t know the origin of COVID-19.”
According to a congressional official, an important congressional group has been informed that it may receive a copy of a confidential report on Thursday. (Reporting by Gabriel Crossley in Beijing, reporting by Michael Martina, Andrea Shalal, Steve Holland and Mark Hosenball in Washington; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Richard Pullin)
