China rejects US report’s lab-leak theory on origin

Beijing: China on Monday rejected a new US report that claims the Covid-19 virus may have leaked from a bio laboratory in Wuhan, saying the origins-tracing of the pandemic “is about science and should not be politicised.”

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said the international experts have considered the theory that the pandemic might have leaked from a Chinese laboratory as “extremely unlikely”.

She said it is a science-based, authoritative conclusion reached by the experts of the WHO-China joint mission after field trips to the lab in Wuhan and in-depth communication with researchers. Mao’s remarks came in response to the US Department of Energy’s (USDE) latest assessment that the coronavirus mostly likely leaked from a bio laboratory in Wuhan.

“It was accurately recorded in the mission’s report and has received extensive recognition from the international community,” she said.

“The origins-tracing of SARS-CoV-2 is about science and should not be politicised. China has always supported and participated in global science-based origins-tracing,” Mao said.

The USDE has assessed in the intelligence report that it had “low confidence” that the Covid-19 virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan, CNN reported on Sunday.

A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion, it said.

The Huanan market in central China’s Wuhan city was the epicentre of the pandemic. From its origin there, the SARS-CoV-2 virus rapidly spread to other locations in Wuhan in late 2019 and then to the rest of the world, killing nearly seven million people.