Chinese embassy steps up Beijing’s protests before US Covid-19 report
- Embassy in Washington publishes commentary before release of US intelligence report on Covid-19’s origins, dismissing Wuhan lab leak theory
- It says US media rejected its attempts to explain China’s position, and repeats Beijing’s claims that the virus may have come from US labs
Beijing’s embassy in the US on Wednesday released a commentary – after saying US media outlets declined to publish it – that rejected the idea that Covid-19 could have leaked from a laboratory in China, reasoning that scientific consensus was that it originated from nature. It suggested that the World Health Organization (WHO), whose attempt to further investigate a Chinese lab was refused by Beijing, should investigate whether the virus came from a US lab.
A top WHO official said in a briefing on Wednesday that it was “slightly contradictory” for China to say the lab leak hypothesis was unfounded in the Chinese context but ask the health agency to investigate labs in other countries, but said he was open to understanding why the Chinese side made the statement.
The embassy in Washington said that the as yet unreleased American report – which examined whether the virus came from nature or an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) – “proceeded from the wrong premise in the beginning, because there is no such thing as any virus manufactured by a Chinese lab”.
It reiterated Beijing’s increasingly vocal and baseless claims that the virus may instead have emerged from US labs, and its calls for the WHO to carry out the second phase of its origin tracings investigation in the United States instead of China.
“With its own door tightly shut, the US is agitating for tracing the origin in China again in an attempt to prove the virus was leaked from the WIV,” read the embassy’s statement, posted on its website. “Given its own questionable record on laboratories, shouldn’t the US invite the WHO to do origin studies in Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina?”
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Beijing has raised conspiracy theories previously about the US being the source of the virus, but the embassy’s statement is part of a louder, more combative effort to influence the narrative, before the US intelligence report on the issue, parts of which are expected to be declassified in the coming days.
