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Beijing has responded to President Joe Biden’s Wednesday announcement of a probe into COVID-19 origins by denouncing the “lab leak” hypothesis as a conspiracy theory and urging an investigation into secret U.S. bio-labs around the world.
On Thursday, Chinese Embassy in the U.S. released a statement on the origin tracing of COVID-19, saying:
“Lately, some people have played the old trick of political hype on the origin tracing of COVID-19 in the world. Smear campaign and blame shifting are making a comeback, and the conspiracy theory of ‘lab leak’ is resurfacing.”
Without naming names, the statement implies that “some political forces have been fixated on political manipulation and blame game, while ignoring their people’s urgent need to fight the pandemic and the international demand for cooperation on this front,” something that has “caused a tragic loss of many lives.”
China is calling for international cooperation to trace the origins of Covid-19 “on the basis of respecting facts and science, with a view of better coping with unexpected epidemics in the future,” the statement said. Politicizing the probe will make it “hard to find the origin of the virus” but also “seriously hamper international cooperation on the pandemic.”
“Out of a sense of responsibility towards the health of mankind,” Beijing supports “a comprehensive study of all early cases of [COVID]-19 found worldwide and a thorough investigation into some secretive bases and biological laboratories all over the world,” the embassy said, which will be “full, transparent and evidence-based, and shall get to the bottom to make everything clear.”
While it’s become conventional wisdom in the United States to believe that the novel coronavirus first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 — with the only mystery being whether it was transmitted from animals to humans via the city’s filthy wet market or escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) lab — China has rejected both theories.
At a press conference in March 2020, Lijian Zhao, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry instead voiced his suspicion that it actually was the U.S. scientists who developed the virus. He claimed that the covert research took place in one of American bioweapon laboratories and then was sent to China during the Wuhan military games in October that year.
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Pointing to a video of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Robert Redfield apparently admitting several deaths from COVID-19 before they were able to test for it, Zhao also tweeted that the United States “owes us explanation:”
“It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan,” Zhao suggested, calling for the CDC — and the Americans in general — to “be transparent” and share what they know about where and when “Patient Zero” was first diagnosed.
In the video, Redfield acknowledged that some cases of coronavirus were misclassified as influenza as the medics did not have an accurate test for the new epidemic at the time. He did not elaborate on when these misdiagnosed cases first appeared — saying only that “some cases have been diagnosed that way.”
Chinese officials repeatedly called the U.S. to follow China’s lead and invite the WHO experts to Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army Futures Command installation that is believed to conduct medical and biological experiments, along with the American “200-plus” overseas bio-labs, and disclose the detailed data and information on the outbreaks of respiratory disease in northern Virginia in July 2019 and the EVALI (E-cigarette, or Vaping, Product Use-Associated Lung Injury) outbreak in Wisconsin.
U.S. officials from both Trump and Biden administrations have condemned the China’s effort to pin the blame for the pandemic on America as “false, baseless, and unscientific claims.” They assert that the Chinese government worked for more than a year to thwart an independent investigation into the origins of the deadly virus, and both administrations cast doubt on the manner in which a joint WHO-China report released was conducted in early 2021. The study states that that transmission of the virus from bats to humans through another animal is the most likely scenario and that a lab leak is “extremely unlikely.” Later, the WHO added to the confusion and suspicions, saying the report “was not extensive enough,” and that the further investigation of the Wuhan lab is needed.
Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced in January that U.S. officials had “reason to believe” that Wuhan lab staff contracted a virus that produced “symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”
The “lab leak” theory is gaining credibility among U.S. top federal officials. Naturally, the question about holding the entities responsible for the outbreak accountable, is hanging in the air. As of today, the White House won’t say if China will be punished if the Wuhan “lab leak” is proven correct.
