China calls COVID ‘lab leak’ theory a lie after WHO report

BEIJING (AP) — China attacked the concept that the coronavirus pandemic might have originated as a leak from a Chinese laboratory as a politically enthusiastic lie, immediately after the World Health Firm encouraged in its strongest phrases still that a deeper probe is wanted into whether a lab accident may possibly be to blame.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian also turned down accusations that China had not absolutely cooperated with investigators, indicating it welcomed a science-dependent probe but rejected any political manipulation.

He also reiterated calls for an investigation into “highly suspicious laboratories this sort of as Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina” in the United States in which China has advised, devoid of evidence, that the U.S. was producing the coronavirus as a bioweapon.

“The lab leak principle is entirely a lie concocted by anti-China forces for political applications, which has very little to do with science,” Zhao mentioned at a daily briefing.

“We always supported and participated in science-primarily based worldwide virus tracing, but we firmly opposed any forms of political manipulation,” he mentioned, repeating China’s long-standing rationalization for delaying or rejecting more investigations into the virus’s origins.

COVID-19

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Zhao explained China has produced key contributions toward virus tracing, sharing the most data and investigation results.

That “fully displays China’s open, transparent and dependable frame of mind, as perfectly as its guidance for the perform of the WHO and the advisory group,” he reported.

The WHO’s stance in a report introduced Thursday is a sharp reversal of the U.N. overall health agency’s initial evaluation of the pandemic’s origins. It comes soon after a lot of critics accused WHO of getting much too speedy to dismiss or underplay a lab-leak concept that set Chinese officers on the defensive.

Next a tightly controlled visit to China very last year, the WHO concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” the coronavirus may have unfold to human beings from a lab in the town of Wuhan. A lot of experts suspect the coronavirus jumped from bats to folks, quite possibly by using an additional animal.

Even so, in the Thursday report, WHO’s expert team claimed “key items of data” to demonstrate how the pandemic began had been however lacking. The scientists explained the group would “remain open to any and all scientific proof that gets to be available in the long run to make it possible for for in depth tests of all sensible hypotheses.”

Pinpointing a disease’s resource in animals typically usually takes years. It took extra than a 10 years for scientists to pinpoint the species of bats that ended up the purely natural reservoir for SARS, a relative of COVID-19.

The professional team also famous that given that lab mishaps in the earlier have induced some outbreaks, the theory could not be discounted. They said China has not offered any experiments to WHO that assessed the possibility of the coronavirus ensuing from a laboratory leak.

The new report is indicative of a a lot more confrontational connection among China’s authoritarian Communist leadership and the WHO, which had initially been accused of staying extremely deferential to Beijing, especially by the previous U.S. Trump administration.

The coronavirus has killed more than 6.3 million men and women throughout the world, forced dozens of countries into lockdown and upended the globe economy. It was initial detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 and was initially joined to a regular industry where by wild animals were being sold for food.

China was accused of responding little by little and covering up the extent of the outbreak, just before it locked down the whole city of Wuhan and surrounding regions in the first of a sequence of draconian actions labeled “zero-COVID” which proceed nowadays as considerably of the rest of the earth is opening up all over again.

Final month, the WHO named “zero-COVID” unsustainable, pointing to amplified know-how of the virus and the cost to the overall economy and civil legal rights. China rejected the criticism as “irresponsible.”

China was also accused of primary a disinformation campaign, suggesting the virus was detected somewhere else ahead of the Wuhan outbreak and putting ahead other theories aimed at diverting consideration from China.

Investigations by The Connected Press found that some prime WHO insiders had been frustrated by China for the duration of the first outbreak even as WHO heaped praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping. They were being also upset about how China sought to clamp down on analysis into the origins of COVID-19.

Zhao appeared to indicate that China would reject any criticisms or suspicions of it.

“Research on the origin of the virus must adhere to scientific concepts and should really not be subject to political interference,” Zhao mentioned.