Chinese embassy steps up Beijing’s protests before US Covid-19 report
- Embassy in Washington publishes commentary before release of US intelligence report on Covid-19’s origins, dismissing Wuhan lab leak theory
- It says US media rejected its attempts to explain China’s position, and repeats Beijing’s claims that the virus may have come from US labs
Beijing’s embassy in the US on Wednesday released a commentary – after saying US media outlets declined to publish it – that rejected the idea that Covid-19 could have leaked from a laboratory in China, reasoning that scientific consensus was that it originated from nature. It suggested that the World Health Organization (WHO), whose attempt to further investigate a Chinese lab was refused by Beijing, should investigate whether the virus came from a US lab.
A top WHO official said in a briefing on Wednesday that it was “slightly contradictory” for China to say the lab leak hypothesis was unfounded in the Chinese context but ask the health agency to investigate labs in other countries, but said he was open to understanding why the Chinese side made the statement.
The embassy in Washington said that the as yet unreleased American report – which examined whether the virus came from nature or an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) – “proceeded from the wrong premise in the beginning, because there is no such thing as any virus manufactured by a Chinese lab”.
It reiterated Beijing’s increasingly vocal and baseless claims that the virus may instead have emerged from US labs, and its calls for the WHO to carry out the second phase of its origin tracings investigation in the United States instead of China.
“With its own door tightly shut, the US is agitating for tracing the origin in China again in an attempt to prove the virus was leaked from the WIV,” read the embassy’s statement, posted on its website. “Given its own questionable record on laboratories, shouldn’t the US invite the WHO to do origin studies in Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina?”
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Beijing has raised conspiracy theories previously about the US being the source of the virus, but the embassy’s statement is part of a louder, more combative effort to influence the narrative, before the US intelligence report on the issue, parts of which are expected to be declassified in the coming days.
The US findings are reportedly inconclusive on whether the virus spread from an animal source, as scientists have said is most likely, or could have leaked from a lab accident in China, as the former Trump administration was especially vocal in claiming.
This is the second time that the Chinese embassy in Washington has said there should be a Covid-19 origins probe at Fort Detrick, after the arrival last month of new Chinese envoy and former foreign vice-minister Qin Gang.
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In the new statement, the Chinese embassy said it had submitted articles countering the lab leak theory to US media, but they had been rejected.
“[The embassy] recently wrote an article to some American media to explain China’s position and clarify the facts, but they were all rejected,” it wrote. “You can accuse others without evidence, without giving them a chance to defend. Is this the ‘freedom of press and speech’ in the United States?”
Qin’s predecessor Cui Tiankai, the longest-serving Chinese ambassador to the US, was seen as more moderate. The Chinese embassy under Cui had not published any statements on Fort Detrick, and Cui said in an interview with CBS in February 2020 that the notion that the virus came from a military lab in the US was “absolutely crazy”.
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Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies programme, said on Wednesday that he found it “difficult to understand” the contradiction of China’s stance on the lab leak hypothesis but that he was “very willing to engage with our Chinese colleagues to understand what exactly they mean by that statement”.
“The current situation is that all of the hypotheses regarding the origins of the virus are still on the table, and some are more likely than others based on the current analysis, but all of those hypotheses require further elucidation and further inquiry and we will go and look where all of those leads take the WHO,” he said.
Additional reporting by Simone McCarthy
