BEIJING - China has restated its case that Covid-19 may have originated in the United States after the administration of US President Donald Trump blamed a lab leak in China.
The White House launched a new Covid-19 website on April 18 in which it said the coronavirus came from a lab leak in China. The site is also highly critical of former president Joe Biden, former top US health official Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization.
The website, with a home page resembling a promo for a movie thriller starring Donald Trump, replaces the official Covid.gov site that Americans have relied on for factual information about tests, vaccines, treatment and other matters.
In a white paper on its pandemic response released on Wednesday by the official Xinhua news agency, Beijing accused the US of politicising the matter of the origins of Covid-19. It cited a lawsuit in the US state of Missouri which resulted in a $24-billion ruling against China for hoarding protective medical equipment and covering up the outbreak.
China shared relevant information with the WHO and the international community in a timely manner, the white paper said, emphasising that a joint study by the WHO and China had concluded that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely”.
The US should not continue to “pretend to be deaf and dumb”, but should respond to the legitimate concerns of the international community, the white paper said.
“Substantial evidence suggested the Covid-19 might have emerged in the United States earlier than its officially-claimed timeline, and earlier than the outbreak in China,” it said.
The US Central Intelligence Agency said in January the pandemic was more likely to have emerged from a lab in China than from nature, after the agency had for years said it could not reach a conclusion on the matter.
It said it had “low confidence” in its new assessment and noted that both lab origin and natural origin remain plausible.
An official at China’s National Health Commission said the next step in origin-tracing work should focus on the US, according to Xinhua, which cited a statement about the white paper.
