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Friday, June 20, 2025

China says it’s been ‘open and transparent’ on COVID origins

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843 days ago
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People, some wearing face masks visit the Temple of Heaven Park in Beijing, Sunday, Feb. 26, 2023. Visitors flock to the tourist sites in cities in China after authorities lifted all bans on public gatherings from the outbreak of COVID-19. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

People, some wearing face masks visit the Temple of Heaven Park in Beijing, Sunday, Feb. 26, 2023. Visitors flock to the tourist sites in cities in China after authorities lifted all bans on public gatherings from the outbreak of COVID-19. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

Chi­na on Tues­day said it has been “open and trans­par­ent” in the search for the ori­gins of COVID-19, af­ter ques­tions about how the pan­dem­ic be­gan re­ceived new at­ten­tion.

Most re­cent­ly, the U.S. De­part­ment of En­er­gy as­sessed with “low con­fi­dence” that the pan­dem­ic that was first de­tect­ed in the cen­tral Chi­nese city of Wuhan in late 2019 be­gan with the leak of a virus from a lab. The re­port hasn’t been made pub­lic.

Chi­na had “shared the most da­ta and re­search re­sults on virus trac­ing and made im­por­tant con­tri­bu­tions to glob­al virus trac­ing re­search,” For­eign Min­istry spokesper­son Mao Ning Mao told re­porters at a dai­ly brief­ing.

“Politi­ciz­ing the is­sue of virus trac­ing will not smear Chi­na but will on­ly dam­age the U.S.’s own cred­i­bil­i­ty,” Mao said, in re­sponse to com­plaints from U.S. of­fi­cials and mem­bers of Con­gress that Chi­na has not been en­tire­ly co­op­er­a­tive.

Her com­ments came amid con­tin­u­ing ques­tions about how the virus that has killed more than 6.8 mil­lion peo­ple world­wide first emerged.

Oth­ers in the U.S. in­tel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty dis­agree with the U.S. En­er­gy De­part­ment as­sess­ment of the lab leak, cit­ing dif­fer­ing opin­ions with­in the gov­ern­ment. “There is just not an in­tel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty con­sen­sus,” John Kir­by, the spokesman for the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil, said Mon­day.

The DOE con­clu­sion was first re­port­ed over the week­end in the Wall Street Jour­nal, which said the clas­si­fied re­port was based on new in­tel­li­gence and not­ed in an up­date to a 2021 doc­u­ment. The DOE over­sees a na­tion­al net­work of labs in the U.S.

White House of­fi­cials on Mon­day de­clined to con­firm press re­ports about the as­sess­ment.

In 2021, of­fi­cials re­leased an in­tel­li­gence re­port sum­ma­ry that said four mem­bers of the U.S. in­tel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty be­lieved with low con­fi­dence that the virus was first trans­mit­ted from an an­i­mal to a hu­man, and a fifth be­lieved with mod­er­ate con­fi­dence that the first hu­man in­fec­tion was linked to a lab. —BEI­JING (AP)

_____

Source: THE AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS

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