BEIJING BLAST
China slams Biden over Covid Wuhan ‘lab leak’ probe and calls investigation a ‘smear campaign’ and a ‘conspiracy theory’
CHINA has slammed Joe Biden for launching a probe into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and called on the US to open up its labs for investigation.
The Democrat announced yesterday a review into the after allegedly shutting down a previous investigation.
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Foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian hit back on Thursday, saying Biden isn't interested in "serious" scientific origin tracing and doesn't care about "facts or truth".
Zhao also called for the US to open up its labs for investigation.
He said: "The US side claims that it wants to participate in a comprehensive, transparent evidence-based investigation.
"We would like to ask the US side to do the same as China and immediately cooperate with the World Health Organization on origin tracing research in a scientific manner."
The Chinese Embassy in Washington was even more scathing, calling the probe a "smear campaign"; and part of a "conspiracy theory."
A statement from the embassy read: "Smear campaign and blame-shifting are making a comeback, and the conspiracy theory of 'lab leak' is resurfacing."
Biden told reporters yesterday that the intelligence community will “redouble their efforts” to discover the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Experts will report back to the president within 90 days.
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He said: “As of today, the U.S. Intelligence Community has ‘coalesced around two likely scenarios’ but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question.”
They will be investigating whether the virus jumped from an animal host to humans or whether it was accidentally released from a lab in Wuhan, China.
The theory that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak has become increasingly mainstream in recent days despite being condemned as a conspiracy theory over the past year and a half.
Former president often championed the lab-leak theory at his campaign rallies during last year’s presidential election campaign.
Biden added that "the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other."
The administration has spent months minimalizing the possibility that the virus originated in a lab but is now calling on China to be transparent about the outbreak.
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It called on China to cooperate with an international probe into the pandemic's origins.
The president previously warned that there may never be a full understanding of the origins of the Covid pandemic as a result of Beijing's refusal to cooperate with investigations.
He said: “The failure to get our inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of COVID-19.”
It’s reported that the administration shut down an investigation into the Wuhan institute at the center of the Covid-19 lab "leak" theory.
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The probe was launched last fall by allies of then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, , citing sources close to the matter.
The news comes as a renewed interest into whether the virus could have originated in a lab has been made public.
that he couldn't be certain scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology avoided using US funding to conduct "gain-of-function" experiments that may have led to the Covid-19 outbreak.
A bombshell report released by the this week alleged that three staffers at the center , weeks before China disclosed the outbreak to the world.
The report led to renewed calls for a broader probe into whether Covid-19 could have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, where the pandemic is widely believed to have begun.
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Fauci previously admitted that he's that the virus developed naturally.
said he is all but certain that Covid-19 originated from a lab.
He told Dan Bongino on Monday: “I think you can take the word ‘potential’ out that it came from the lab.”
In March, a World Health Organization (WHO) scientist investigating the origins of the pandemic said the ".
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Peter Ben Embarek, who led the WHO team in their Wuhan investigation, said they failed to get "hard facts or detailed data" from the lab.
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The Wuhan Institute of Virology is known to have been experimenting with bat coronaviruses and creating infectious hybrid strains for tests.
China has always denied allegations of a possible lab leak.
Fauci admits he doesn't know whether China LIED and used $600k US funding to develop Covid as 'lab leak' suspicions grow
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