Lab claim enrages China
WASHINGTON: China has warned of a “counter-attack” against the US over an intelligence report that keeps open the possibility the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan rather than jumping from animals to humans.
US President Joe Biden has received the classified analysis by US spy agencies of the origin of the virus. It is said to have proven inconclusive but to have criticised the Chinese authorities for failing to share information.
Mr Biden, 78, is expected to release a declassified version soon. World Health Organisation researchers warned in the journal Nature that the window of opportunity was closing to access key data on the virus’s origins.
At the end of May Mr Biden asked US intelligence agencies to report back to him in 90 days after getting conflicting theories from three agencies: two judged the cause was probably human contact with an infected animal and one favoured a “laboratory accident” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
A US official told The Wall Street Journal: “It was a deep dive, but you can only go so deep as the situation allows. If China’s not going to give access to certain data sets, you’re never really going to know.”
The Washington Post reported that the investigation was inconclusive. David Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist, told the paper: “We should not even be thinking about closing the book or backing off.”
China went on the offensive before the publication of the declassified report. “Scapegoating China cannot whitewash the US,” said Fu Cong, a director-general in the foreign ministry. “If they want to baselessly accuse China, they better be prepared to accept the counter-attack from China.”
Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the foreign ministry, claimed the report was meant to deflect attention from US failings during the pandemic.
“It’s a report to frame others, which cannot come to any scientific conclusion on the source of the virus,” he said.
Beijing has fought back against the claims, with official statements from the foreign ministry that the virus escaped from a US military lab.
A joint WHO-China report this year concluded a lab leak was “extremely unlikely” and the most likely scenario was that the virus jumped from bats to another animal, which then infected humans. However, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO directorgeneral, said in March that “all hypotheses are on the table”.
Independent members of the WHO-China team have called on scientists and political leaders to accelerate follow-up research. Delay would “render some of the studies biologically impossible”, they wrote in Nature. The lab leak theory gained ground this year in the face of China’s refusal to share data or allow forensic visits to the Wuhan laboratory.