US President Joe Biden called on intelligence officials to ‘redouble’ their efforts to get to the bottom of whether a Chinese laboratory accident led to the coronavirus being transmitted to humans. This has been denounced by China as ‘political manipulation and blame shifting’.
Beijing has rejected any link between Covid-19 and a virus research lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected in late 2019, according to the BBC.
There have since been more than 168 million cases worldwide and about 3.5 million deaths reported.
President Biden said in a statement on Wednesday that, after taking office, he had asked for a report on the origins of Covid-19, ‘including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident’, and that, having received it this month, he had asked for ‘additional follow-up’.
According to the BBC, recent US media reports have suggested growing evidence that the virus could have emerged from a laboratory in China, perhaps through an accidental leak. An earlier theory suggested that it could have passed to humans from animals at a seafood market in Wuhan.
Responding to Biden’s statement, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said it showed the US ‘does not care about facts or truth, and has zero interest in a serious science-based study of origins’.
He was quoted as saying: ‘Their aim is to use the pandemic to pursue stigmatisation, political manipulation and blame shifting. They are being disrespectful to science, irresponsible to people’s lives and counter-productive to the concerted efforts to fight the virus.’