China says it’s been ‘open and transparent’ about COVID-19 origins – National | 24CA News
China on Tuesday mentioned it has been “open and transparent” within the seek for the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and dismissed U.S. criticism as politicizing the problem.
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 informed reporters at a every day briefing.
“Politicizing the issue of virus tracing will not smear China but will only damage the U.S.’s own credibility,” Mao mentioned, in response to complaints from U.S. officers and members of Congress that China has not been solely cooperative.
Her feedback got here amid persevering with questions on how the virus that has killed greater than 6.8 million individuals worldwide first emerged.
Most just lately, the U.S. Department of Energy assessed with “low confidence” that the pandemic that was first detected within the central Chinese metropolis of Wuhan in late 2019 started with the leak of a virus from a lab. The report hasn’t been made public.
Others within the U.S. intelligence neighborhood disagree, citing differing opinions throughout the authorities. “There is just not an intelligence community consensus,” John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, mentioned Monday.
The U.S. Energy Department’s conclusion was first reported over the weekend within the Wall Street Journal, which mentioned the labeled report was based mostly on new intelligence and famous in an replace to a 2021 doc. The DOE oversees a nationwide community of labs within the U.S.
White House officers on Monday declined to verify press studies concerning the evaluation.
In 2021, officers launched an intelligence report abstract that mentioned 4 members of the U.S. intelligence neighborhood believed with low confidence that the virus was first transmitted from an animal to a human, and a fifth believed with reasonable confidence that the primary human an infection was linked to a lab.
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