China chastises U.S. for COVID-19 theory

Trump, officials fuelled claims that pathogen escaped from Wuhan lab

WASHINGTON—China is pushing back against U.S. President Donald Trump and some of his officials, who’ve flirted in recent days with an outlier theory that the coronavirus was set loose by a Chinese lab that let it escape.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson on Friday accused the U.S. administration of attempting to shift the focus from its own missteps in dealing with the pandemic by talking up a theory that it was started by a pathogen from a laboratory in Wuhan, the city where the global outbreak began.

But that spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, has demonstrated that China, too, is not above sowing confusion in the face of the pandemic. He tweeted in March the falsehood that the virus might have come from the U.S. army.

A scientific consensus is still evolving, but the leading theory is that infection among humans began at an animal market in Wuhan, probably from an animal that got the virus from a bat.

Without the weight of evidence, Trump and some administration officials are trying to blame China for sickness and death from COVID-19 in the United States.

“More and more, we’re hearing the story,” Trump said. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added, “The mere fact that we don’t know the answers — that China hasn’t shared the answers — I think is very, very telling.”

On Friday, Pompeo said the U.S. is pressing China to let outside experts into the lab “so that we can determine precisely where this virus began.”

Asked on Fox Business Network about whether China might have manipulated the virus for sinister purposes, he said, “It is completely appropriate that the world ask the right questions,” then diverted to another subject.

Trump officials have largely been steering clear of baseless conspiracy theories in circulation that the virus was intentionally set loose by China, even as some give weight to the unsubstantiated idea the virus mistakenly spread from a negligent lab in Wuhan.

Experts overwhelmingly say analysis of the new coronavirus’s genome rules out the possibility that it was engineered by humans, as some commentators have suggested.

Nor is it likely that the virus emerged from a negligent laboratory in Wuhan, they say. “I would put it on a list of 1,000 different scenarios,” said Nathan Grubaugh of Yale University, who studies the epidemiology of microbial disease.

Scientists say the virus arose naturally in bats.

Even so, Pompeo and others are pointing fingers at an institute that is run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and has done groundbreaking research tracing the likely origins of the SARS virus, finding new bat viruses and discovering how they could jump to people.

“We know that there is the Wuhan Institute of Virology just a handful of miles away from where the wet market was,” Pompeo said. The institute has an address 13 kilometres from the market.

U.S. officials say the American Embassy in Beijing flagged concerns about potential safety issues at the lab in Wuhan in 2018, but stressed there’s no evidence the virus originated there nearly two years later.