CHINA SAYS POLITICS BEHIND US CALL FOR VIRUS ORIGIN PROBE
Biden has ordered the US intel community to present a report on the origin of the pandemic in 90 days
BEIJING: China on Thursday accused the Biden administration of playing politics and shirking its responsibility in calling for a renewed investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic that was first detected in China in late 2019.
Foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said that President Joe Biden’s order showed the US “does not care about facts and truth, nor is it interested in serious scientific origin tracing.”
Biden told US intelligence officials to redouble their efforts to investigate the origins of Covid-19, including possibility of it coming from a Chinese lab.
BEIJING: China on Thursday accused the Biden administration of playing politics and shirking its responsibility in calling for a renewed investigation into the origin of the coronavirus pandemic that was first detected in China in late 2019.
Foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a daily briefing that President Joe Biden’s order showed the US “does not care about facts and truth, nor is it interested in serious scientific origin tracing”.
Biden told US intelligence officials to redouble their efforts to investigate the origin of the pandemic, including any possibility the trail might lead to a Chinese laboratory.
After months of minimising that possibility as a fringe theory, the Biden administration is joining worldwide pressure on China to be more open about the outbreak, aiming to head off Republican complaints the president has not been tough enough to press China on alleged obstruction.
Republicans, including former president Donald Trump, have promoted the theory that the virus emerged from a laboratory rather than naturally through human contact with an infected animal in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
Zhao also said the US must open itself up to investigations into its biological laboratories, including at the Naval Medical Research Center’s Biological Defense Research Directorate at Fort Detrick in the state of Maryland.
“The US side claims that it wants China to participate in a comprehensive, transparent, evidence-based international investigation,” Zhao said. “We would like to ask the US side to do the same as China and immediately cooperate with the World Health Organization on origin tracing research in a scientific manner.”
Report back in 90 days
Biden on Wednesday asked US intelligence agencies to report back within 90 days. He directed US national laboratories to assist with the investigation and the intelligence community to prepare a list of specific queries for the Chinese government. He called on China to cooperate with international probes into the origin of the pandemic.
Biden in a statement said the majority of the intelligence community had “coalesced” around those two scenarios but “do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other”. He revealed that two agencies lean towards the animal link and “one leans more towards” the lab theory, “each with low or moderate confidence”.
Declassify Covid-19 info
The US Senate on Wednesday passed a bill that would require the declassification of any intelligence on the origin of Covid-19, local media reported.
The bill will require the office of the director of national intelligence 90 days to declassify “any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of the coronavirus disease”.
“The American people deserve to know about the origin of the Covid-19. They deserve to know how this terrible pandemic that has ravaged the globe and our country, how it got started and what’s China’s role in starting it,” said Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo) who introduced the bill, The Hill reported.