China on Wednesday rejected American claims that a virus that escaped from a Chinese laboratory may have started the COVID-19 epidemic for the second day in a straight.
According to Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning, the involvement of the American intelligence community is sufficient proof of the “politicization of origin tracing,” in response to remarks made by FBI Director Christopher Wray.
According to Mao, the U.S. won’t be able to disgrace China by reiterating the lab-leak claim and will instead damage its reputation.
“We encourage the United States to respect science and facts… stop making origin tracing about intellect and politics, and stop upsetting social cohesion and origins cooperation,” she said.
Wray stated, “The FBI has long believed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a probable lab mishap in (central China’s) Wuhan,” in an interview with Fox News that aired on Tuesday.
Wray stated, “In this case, you’re talking about a potential leak from a lab that the Chinese government controls.
The Chinese government, it appears to me, has been doing its best to attempt to obstruct and distort the work here, the work that we’re doing, the work that our U.S. government and close foreign partners are doing, he continued, referring to efforts to track the origin of the coronavirus. It’s unfortunate for everyone that way.
Mao disagreed with a report from the US on Tuesday. According to the Department of Energy, there is “low confidence” that a nearby government laboratory was the source of the virus discovered initially in Wuhan in late 2019.
Officials in Washington emphasized that U.S. agencies do not agree on the virus’s origin because the report has not been made public.
On Tuesday, Mao emphasized that China has been “open and transparent” in its investigation into the virus’s origins and has “provided the most data and research results on virus tracing and made significant contributions to worldwide virus tracing research.”
This year, a World Health Organization expert panel stated that “important pieces of data” still needed to explain how the pandemic started.
The researchers listed several directions for future study, such as investigations into the function of wild animals and environmental investigations in regions where the virus may have first spread.
The Associated Press previously reported that the Chinese government was tightly regulating research into the cause of the pandemic, which has killed more than 6.8 million people globally, clamping down on some studies and promoting fanciful hypotheses that it might have originated from elsewhere.
While many scientists believe the virus originated in animals, mutated, and then leaped to people, as has happened with other viruses, some experts are receptive to the lab-leak scenario. The cause of the pandemic may not be discovered for many years, if at all.
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