United States Accused by China of Originating Covid-19, As a Counter to Trump's Allegation
China has rebuffed the claims made by Trump's administration, saying that COVID-19 might have originated in the United States. In a recent white paper, China accused the US of politicizing the matter and criticizing the World Health Organisation (WHO) for its handling of the pandemic's origins.
The White House launched a COVID-19 website on April 18, where it claimed that the coronavirus came from a lab leak in China, targeting former President Joe Biden, former top US health official Anthony Fauci, and the WHO. In response, China's official Xinhua news agency released a white paper stating that China shared relevant information with the WHO and the international community in a timely manner.
The white paper emphasized that a joint study by the WHO and China concluded that a lab leak was "extremely unlikely." The US should address the international community's legitimate concerns, the white paper added, stating that substantial evidence hinted at a possible earlier outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is believed to have assessed that the pandemic was more likely to have emerged from a lab in China than from nature, although it maintained low confidence in this assessment and acknowledged that both lab origin and natural origin remain plausible. However, it is important to note that there is no credible evidence that the CIA changed its official assessment regarding the origin of COVID-19 from natural emergence to a lab leak in China specifically in January 2021.
As Congressional reports reveal, Republican members have repeatedly asserted the lab leak hypothesis but have not provided conclusive new evidence, with Democrats generally criticizing these conclusions as unfounded. The intelligence community’s stance has been that both scenarios remain plausible, and no single agency, including the CIA, is known to have made a definitive public change of assessment toward a lab leak specifically in January 2021. In essence, claims that the CIA changed its official assessment to support the lab leak theory in January 2021 are not substantiated by available public sources.
- The ongoing debate about the origin of COVID-19 has become entwined with policy-and-legislation, as both US and Chinese governments have accused each other of politicizing the matter.
- As the politics surrounding the COVID-19 origin heated up, general-news outlets have been scrutinizing the latest developments in the ongoing policy-and-legislation discussions on this topic.
