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China criticises US’s ‘politicisation’ of search for Covid origins amid new report

White House official says Joe Biden has been briefed on the US intelligence review

A doctor checks a patient who is infected with Covid-19 at the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan, China. Covid-19 first emerged in Wuhan in 2019. Photograph: STR/AFP via Getty Images

Wed Aug 25 2021 - 21:52

China criticised on Wednesday the US "politicisation" of efforts to trace the origin of the novel coronavirus, shortly before the release of a US intelligence community report on the virus.

The US report was intended to resolve disputes among intelligence agencies considering different theories about how Covid-19 emerged, including a once-dismissed theory about a Chinese laboratory accident.

“Scapegoating China cannot whitewash the US,” Fu Cong, director general of the Chinese ministry of foreign affairs’s arms control department, told a briefing.

He also said: “We will continue to co-operate with international organisations like the WHO in their research and in their search for the origins.

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“But we do not accept baseless and unfounded accusations that are politically motivated. And if they want to baselessly accuse China, so they better be prepared to accept the counterattack from China.”

A White House official said on Wednesday that US president Joe Biden had been briefed on the classified report. "We look forward to having an unclassified summary of key judgments to share soon," the official said.

The intelligence report on the origins of Covid-19 is inconclusive, according to officials familiar with it, the Washington Post reported, citing two unidentified US officials.

US officials say they did not expect the review to lead to firm conclusions after China stymied earlier international efforts to gather key information on the ground.

China has said a laboratory leak was highly unlikely, and it has ridiculed a theory that the novel coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, the city where Covid-19 infections emerged in late 2019, setting off the pandemic.

A joint WHO-Chinese team visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology during an investigation into the source of the virus but the US said it had concerns about the access granted to the investigation.

Mr Fu said China was not engaged in a disinformation campaign. – Reuters/Bloomberg

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