China is resisting pressure for an investigation into the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic emerged from a virology lab in Wuhan, rejecting calls for an expanded investigation as “political manipulation” by the United States.
“For some people in the U.S., what they say is ‘facts,’ but what is really on their mind is political manipulation,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters Wednesday. “They are obsessed with spreading ‘lab leak theory’ and other conspiracy theories and disinformation.”
Chinese officials have denied responsibility for the pandemic throughout the crisis, although Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping did acknowledge “obvious shortcomings” to their initial response. Beijing’s censorship of the Chinese doctors who first detected the public health threat stoked suspicions about the regime’s culpability for the crisis, which have been renewed in recent weeks as researchers and Western governments have expressed dissatisfaction with the initial World Health Organization investigation and raised questions about research projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“While I do believe that a lab incident is the most likely origin of the pandemic, this is only a hypothesis,” Atlantic Council senior fellow Jamie Metzl, a former Bill Clinton administration official who is on the WHO’s expert advisory committee on human genome editing, wrote this week. “When comparing the evidence for each possibility, the case for a lab incident origin seems significantly stronger to me. Additional evidence could always change that.”
FAUCI NO LONGER CONFIDENT COVID-19 EMERGED NATURALLY
Chinese officials have renewed their suggestion that the U.S. Army might somehow be responsible for the outbreak. U.S. officials have condemned the idea as “false, baseless, and unscientific claims” about the pandemic’s origin.
“If the U.S. side truly demands a completely transparent investigation, it should follow China’s lead to invite the WHO experts to the U.S., open Fort Detrick and bio-labs overseas to the rest of the world, and disclose the detailed data and information on the unexplained outbreaks of respiratory disease in northern Virginia in July 2019 and the EVALI outbreak in Wisconsin,” Zhao said.
Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s team 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.”
An initial World Health Organization investigation conducted under restrictions imposed by Chinese officials declared any link to the local lab “extremely unlikely,” but WHO leaders acknowledged a need for “further investigation” of the hypothesis.
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“Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable,” a group of researchers wrote earlier this month in Science Magazine. “We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data. A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest.”
