Row escalates after US raises heat on Covid lab origin theory

Yashwant Raj and Sutirtho Patranobis

A global row intensified amid renewed calls for an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic on Thursday, with Beijing accusing the Joe Biden administration of playing politics and shirking responsibility, even as the US President pledged to release the findings of the American intelligence community’s probe into the matter.

On Wednesday, US President Joe Biden ordered intelligence

WASHINGTON/BEIJING:

officials to “redouble” their efforts to investigate the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, including a possibility that the trail might lead to a laboratory in China’s Wuhan.

A day later, China said the US was playing politics. Its foreign ministry said scientists from the World Health Organization (WHO) had already said that the “lab leak” theory was unlikely. The ministry also dismissed the theory that the virus may have leaked from a lab as a “conspiracy”.

“Some people in the United States completely ignore facts and science,” foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said on Thursday.

Biden later pledged to release the results of the intelligence community’s investigation into the origins of Covid-19, including the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan virology lab in China, unless it contained something he was “not aware of”.

He previously ordered the community to “redouble their efforts to collect and analyse information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion, and to report back to me in 90 days”.