Beijing has responded to US President Joe Biden’s announcement of a probe into Covid-19 origins by denouncing the “lab leak” hypothesis as a conspiracy theory and urging an investigation into secret US bio-labs around the world.
“Lately, some people have played the old trick of political hype on the origin tracing of [Covid-19] in the world. Smear campaign and blame shifting are making a comeback, and the conspiracy theory of ‘lab leak’ is resurfacing,” a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC said in a statement on Wednesday evening.
Without naming names, the spokesman said that “some political forces have been fixated on political manipulation and blame game, while ignoring their people’s urgent need to fight the pandemic and the international demand for cooperation on this front,” something that has “caused a tragic loss of many lives.”
China has been calling for international cooperation to trace the origins of Covid-19 “on the basis of respecting facts and science, with a view to better coping with unexpected epidemics in the future,” the statement said. Politicizing the probe will make it “hard to find the origin of the virus” but also “seriously hamper international cooperation on the pandemic.”
“Out of a sense of responsibility towards the health of mankind,” Beijing supports “a comprehensive study of all early cases of [Covid]-19 found worldwide and a thorough investigation into some secretive bases and biological laboratories all over the world,” the embassy said, which will be “full, transparent and evidence-based, and shall get to the bottom to make everything clear.”
