China has restated its case that Covid-19 may have originated in the United States, in a white paper on its pandemic response released last week after President Donald Trump blamed a lab leak in China.
The White House launched a Covid-19 website on 18 April in which it said the coronavirus came from a lab leak in China – while criticising former President Joe Biden, former US health official Anthony Fauci, and the WHO.
Reuters reports that in the white paper, released by the official Xinhua news agency, China accused the US of politicising the matter of the origins of Covid-19. It cited a Missouri lawsuit, which resulted in a $24bn ruling against China for hoarding protective medical equipment and covering up the outbreak.
China had 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 Covid-19 might have emerged in the United States earlier than its officially-claimed timeline, and earlier than the outbreak in China,” it added.
In January, the CIA said the pandemic was more likely to have emerged from a lab in China than from nature, after saying – for years – that 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.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Trump officially backs Wuhan lab leak theory
US state wins lawsuit against China for hiding knowledge about Covid
Inquiry into Covid-19's Chinese origins ‘must be independent’ of WHO — open letter