[Spokesperson dismisses Wall Street
Journal claims based on ‘previously undisclosed’ intelligence]
By Vincent Ni
Foreign ministry spokesperson, Zhao
Lijian, said it was “completely untrue” that three researchers at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology (WIV) became sick in autumn 2019. The report, based on
“previously undisclosed” US intelligence, said the said the lab workers staff
had become sick “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal
illness”.
“The United States continues to
hype up the ‘lab-leak’ theory … Does it care about traceability or is it just
trying to distract attention?” Zhao said. He also cited a March
statement from WIV , in which the institute said it had “never dealt
with Sars-CoV-2 before 30 December 2019”.
The Wall Street Journal report
came on the eve of a key meeting of the World Health Organization’s
decision-making body, which is expected to discuss in detail the next phase of
an investigation into the origins of Covid-19.
Separately, CNN
reported on Monday, citing people briefed on the intelligence, that
the intelligence community “still does not know what the researchers were
actually sick with”. “At the end of the day, there is still nothing
definitive,” one of the people who has seen the intelligence told CNN.
Shi Zhengli, who directs the Centre
for Emerging Infectious Diseases at WIV, said earlier this year that all staff
had tested negative for Covid-19 antibodies, and there had been no turnover of
staff on the coronavirus team.
International experts investigating
the origins of the coronavirus said in February, following their trip to China, that it was
“extremely unlikely” that the virus had spread from a lab leak in the city of
Wuhan.
Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the
WHO mission, said at the time that work to identify the origins of Covid-19
pointed to a “natural reservoir” in bats, but it was “unlikely” that this
occurred in Wuhan.
The organisation’s director
general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, however said in March that “all hypotheses
remain on the table” after 14 countries, including the US and UK, made a joint
statement to express concerns over the WHO team’s conclusions.
WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic on
Monday said that the organisation’s technical teams were now deciding on the
next steps. He said further study was needed into the role of animal markets as
well as the lab-leak hypothesis.
In Washington, a US national
security council spokesperson said that the Biden administration continued to
have “serious questions about the earliest days of the Covid-19 pandemic,
including its origins within the People’s Republic of China.”
She said the US government was
working with the WHO and other member states to support an expert-driven
evaluation of the pandemic’s origins “that is free from interference or
politicisation.”
The lab-leak theory has been around
since last year. In January 2020, as China attempted to contain the spread of
the virus, rumours began to spread amid the scramble for answers. The
conservative US website Washington Times, for example, alleged that coronavirus
“may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare programme”.
But what many virus experts deemed
a pure science issue was quickly turned into a diplomatic row, amid growing
tensions between China and the United States. Three weeks after the Washington
Times’s report, Republican senator Tom Cotton raised the lab-leak theory, while
admitting he had no evidence to support it.
In March 2020, Lijian alleged on
his Twitter account that the coronavirus was an “American disease” that might
have been brought to China by members of the United States army who had visited
Wuhan a few months earlier. He provided no evidence to support his theory,
either.
Soon afterwards, several US allies
began calls for an independent inquiry into the origin of Covid-19. Australia’s
prime minister, Scott Morrison, for example, reiterated his country’s call in
his address to the United Nations general assembly in September.