The decision of the President of the United States, Joe Biden, to relaunch the investigation into a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China, to explain the origin of Covid-19 does not pass in Beijing.
Rejecting the legitimacy of a new investigation in China, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, Zhao Lijian, denounced, Thursday, May 27, during a press briefing, “The dark story” US intelligence services.
“The WHO Joint Investigation Team [Organisation mondiale de la santé, envoyée à Wuhan en janvier] judged “extremely unlikely” the theory of a laboratory leak “, Zhao Lijian pointed out. “This is an official, formal and scientific conclusion”, he estimated. “This time the United States is trying to use the intelligence services to carry out an alleged investigation (…), but the dark history of American intelligence has long been known to the whole world ”, said the spokesperson.
In a statement released Thursday, Chinese Embassy in Washington She, too, criticized the desire expressed by Joe Biden to shed light on the origins of Covid-19, saying that the politicization of the origins of the disease would hamper further investigations and undermine global efforts to stem the pandemic. She added that she supported “A comprehensive study of all the first cases of Covid-19 found worldwide and a thorough investigation of certain secret bases and biological laboratories around the world”.
The first cases of Covid-19 were identified at the end of 2019 in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan, before the virus spread across the globe and killed nearly 3.5 million people. After a four-week stay in Wuhan at the start of the year, a joint study by WHO and Chinese experts found in March “Extremely unlikely” a laboratory accident.
Doubts about the official version
But the boss of the WHO himself, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had called for a new investigation into the hypothesis of a laboratory leak. China has repeatedly denied this possibility, saying the United States and other countries are trying to distract from their own failures to contain the spread of the virus.
Long brushed aside by most experts, the theory of a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China, has come back in force in recent weeks.
Sunday the Wall Street Journal claimed to have had access to unpublished information from US intelligence, reporting that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been diagnosed as early as November 2019 with “Symptoms compatible with both those of Covid-19 and those of a seasonal infection”, requiring hospital care. Beijing has denied information from Wall Street Journal, calling them “Totally false”.
In mid-May, around fifteen experts published a column in the journal Science : “We need more research to determine the origin of the pandemic”, they claimed. Theories of animal or accidental origin in the laboratory “Both remain viable”, they wrote, but “They were not given fair consideration”.