Sunday 31 October 2021
US report on Corona origins
China defends itself against “defamation”
The origin of the coronavirus is still puzzled. US intelligence services classify both an animal-to-human transmission and a laboratory accident in China as plausible. According to a supplementary report, however, Beijing is obstructing the investigation. Which causes annoyance in the Middle Kingdom.
China has rejected the publication of an amended version of a report by the US intelligence services on the origin of the coronavirus as politically motivated and “wrong”. A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Beijing complained on Sunday that the debate was further politicized. The US should stop “attacking and slandering China”.
Similar to a previous investigation by the World Health Organization, the US secret services had not come to a clear conclusion in their report published at the end of August. The secret services classified both animal-to-human transmission of the virus and a laboratory accident in China as “plausible hypotheses”, but complained about the lack of samples and data.
The National Intelligence Directorate commissioned by US President Joe Biden had made further parts of the report public this week. The paper emphasizes even more strongly that a clarification of the original question is not possible without new information. Cooperation with China is necessary, but Beijing is hindering international investigations.
Labor theory according to WHO experts “extremely unlikely”
“No matter how often this report is published and how many versions are put together, nothing can change the fact that it is a purely political and false report,” said China’s Foreign Office spokesman Wang Wenbin. The mere fact that secret services are used in the search for origin is “clear evidence” of the political nature of the debate.
The corona pandemic, which has now fallen victim to over five million people worldwide, began in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019. It was soon speculated that the virus could have escaped in an accident from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, which is researching coronaviruses. The Chinese government vigorously denies this.
Accordingly, the WHO investigation was politically highly controversial. An international WHO team was only able to visit Wuhan in January of this year – more than a year after the virus was discovered. Their report was published in late March but did not provide any clear results. The WHO experts classified the so-called laboratory theory as “extremely unlikely”.
However, doubts quickly arose about the investigation and the report. Many countries expressed concern that international experts had been denied access to critical data during their investigation in China. The Chinese government vehemently rejects further investigations, as requested by WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.