A Florida Senator spectacularly claimed he’s got intelligence proving China is obstructing the West’s search for a Covid-19 cure – He shouldn’t be shy to let the world see the “evidence,” Beijing’s diplomats swiftly quipped.
Rick Scott, who sits on the Senate’s Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, pulled no punches when talking China on the BBC on Sunday. Apart from being hostile to the US and democracy, Beijing communists are hindering the development of a coronavirus vaccine, and are trying “to sabotage us or slow it down,” Scott alleged.
He said there’s “evidence” substantiating the bombshell claim but repeatedly refused to disclose it, citing vague considerations regarding secrecy – much to the disappointment of anchor Andrew Marr.
The Senator’s media blitz predictably caught Beijing’s eye the following day. Since the BBC host failed to extract the proof, Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry, challenged Scott into lifting the shroud of mystery.
In response to Scott’s assertion that Beijing doesn’t want the West to develop the vaccine first, Hua stated during a regular press briefing that the search for a Covid cure isn’t a competition at all.
Previously, China’s Science and Technology Minister Wang Zhigang gave reassurances that his country would make such a vaccine a “global public good” when it finally arrives.
The claim that China is hindering the anti-Covid research effort may well be riding a wave of another theory, one that alleges that coronavirus is man-made and was released from a virology lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city that was the epicenter of the epidemic.
Aggressively pushed by top US officials, the theory was consistently denounced by Beijing which called it an attempt to switch attention from Washington’s handling of its epidemic at home. Certain American allies also doubted the Covid-19 was a human creation, although some pundits suggested a ‘leak’ from the lab could have been accidental.
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