US Intelligence has published a report on the origin of the covid-19 and the document has not been slow to receive harsh criticism from Beijing.
The declassified summary was released by the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence on Friday after US President Joe Biden asked intelligence agencies to “redouble” their efforts to determine how. the pandemic began. The president, who ordered the declassification of as much as possible, was informed of the investigation earlier this week.
The intelligence community would be “split” about which of the two theories about the origin of the virus is more likely to be correct. There is consensus among the agencies that the two prevailing theories are plausible.
“All agencies evaluate that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and incident associated with a laboratory“according to the published abstract.
The new US report concludes that analysts will not be able to offer “a more definitive explanation” without new information from China, such as clinical samples and epidemiological data on the first cases.
Therefore, the agencies concluded that “the virus was not developed as a biological weapon”.
Initially, US spy agencies leaned on the explanation that the virus originated in nature. But people familiar with intelligence reports have said there has been little corroboration in recent months that the virus had spread widely and naturally among wild animals. informs Reuters.
The White House calls for transparency
“While this review has been completed, our efforts to understand the origins of this pandemic will not rest,” Biden said in a statement after the publication of the abstract. “We will do everything possible to trace the roots of this outbreak that has caused so much pain and death around the world, so that we can take all necessary precautions to prevent a recurrence,” he added.
Biden criticized China for not being transparent with the investigation and demanded that “fully share the information”, without identifying any coercive measure to achieve cooperation.
“There is critical information about the origins of this pandemic in the People’s Republic of China, but from the beginning, Chinese government officials have worked to prevent international researchers and members of the global public health community from accessing it.” said the president.
Response from Beijing
The Chinese Embassy in Washington responded with an extensive release in which he claimed that the United States had “manufactured” the report and invoked an error by the US intelligence services on weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war.
The statement begins by highlighting that origin tracing is a “science question” and “should and can only be left in the hands of scientists, not intelligence experts.”
“The intelligence community’s report is based on China’s presumption of guilt, and only serves to make China a scapegoat,” they said from the Embassy. “Such a practice will only disrupt and sabotage international cooperation in the search for the origin and in the fight against the pandemic, and it has been widely rejected by the international community,” he added.
They also assured that Washington’s criticism of Beijing for lack of transparency is only an “excuse in its campaign of politicization and stigmatization”, reiterating that since the COVID-19 outbreak, China has “disclosed information, shared the sequencing of the genome of the virus and carried out international cooperation to fight the disease. “
