China Speaks Up Regarding The Real Origin Of Covid-19
China's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning Mao claims that the country has been transparent regarding the highly debated and still unknown origins of Covid-19.
China says it has been completely open and transparent about the origins of Covid-19. The statement follows renewed suggestions that the global pandemic could have been the result of a lab leak. The United States Department of Energy recently assessed with low confidence that the virus, which was initially detected in the city of Wuhan in late 2019, began with a leak from a lab.
“The report hasn’t been made public, and officials in Washington stressed that U.S. agencies are not in agreement on the origin,” the Associated Press reports. “China has shared the most data and research results and made important contributions to global virus tracing,” Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning Mao told reporters about Covid-19.
Still, officials and members of the United States Congress have accused China of not being entirely cooperative with inquiries into the origin. In 2022, a World Health Organization expert group told the Associated Press that key pieces of data to explain how Covid-19 began were still missing. The scientists cited several avenues of required research. This includes evaluating the role of wild animals.
Meanwhile, FBI Director Christopher Wray says the bureau believes Covid-19 probably originated in a Chinese government-controlled lab. “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident,” he told Fox News via the BBC. His comments are the first public confirmation of the classified judgment of how the virus emerged.
However, many scientists have rejected the lab leak theory as lacking in evidence as it may have jumped from animals to humans. Additionally, a joint investigation by China and World Health Organization called the lab leak theory “extremely unlikely” in 2021. But the findings were deeply criticized and its director-general has called for a new inquiry into the origins of Covid-19.
The FBI Director’s comments come days after the U.S. ambassador to China called for the country to be more honest about Covid-19’s origins. As a result, Wray said China has been doing its best to thwart and obfuscate efforts to identify the source of the global pandemic. “That’s unfortunate for everybody,” he told Fox News.
Following the comments, Beijing accused Washington of political manipulation. “The conclusions they have reached have no credibility,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Mao Ning Mao said via the BBC. “Politicizing the issue of virus tracing will not smear China but will only damage the United States’ credibility regarding Covid-19.”
“The U.S Department of Energy’s conclusion was first published in The Wall Street Journal, which said the classified report was based on new intelligence and noted in an update to a 2021 document,” noted the Associated Press. “National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan declined to confirm the findings. But he did reveal that President Biden ordered the national labs to investigate the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak,” the publication continued to highlight.
For now, divisions about how Covid-19 began, remain. “There are a variety of views in the intelligence community,” Sullivan explained via The New York Times. “Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure,” he added.
Suffice it to say, given that growing scientific attention has been given to the next potential pandemic, determining the actual origins of COVID-19 will be invaluable to that research. China’s continuing transparency on the matter is paramount. And it will certainly be interesting to see in the coming months and years what global intelligence will discover related to the emergence of the disease.
