A declassified report from the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence (ONDI) on the origins of COVID-19, released on Friday (29 October), has been rejected by the Chinese government as using “intelligence apparatus instead of scientists” to determine the origins of COVID-19.
RT News reports that on Friday, ODNI released its assessment of how the SARS-CoV-2 virus could have first infected humans, saying the origins of COVID-19 might never be established fully, and that US intelligence found both natural transmission from animals to humans, as well as a lab leak incident, plausible.
The ODNI report theorises that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology “may have unwittingly exposed themselves to the virus without sequencing it during experiments or sampling activities, possibly resulting in asymptomatic or mild infection”. However, the US has so far found no evidence that the lab had worked with the SARS-CoV-2 virus or a close progenitor virus.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington again questioned the US government’s use of “intelligence apparatus instead of scientists” in COVID-19 research.
“No matter how many times it is updated, the so-called ‘assessment on COVID-19 origins’ issued by the US intelligence community is not scientific at all,” embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu said. “It will only undermine science-based origins study and hinder the global effort of finding the source of the virus.”
The report updates a 90-day review released in August, ordered by President Joe Biden. It says the global scientific community “lacks clinical samples or a complete understanding of epidemiological data from the earliest COVID-19 cases,” and accused China of hindering investigations into the origins of the disease, while blaming other countries, including the US.
The embassy said Washington “has been refusing to respond to the international community’s reasonable doubts on the Fort Detrick biolab and the more than 200 overseas bases for biological experiments” conducted there.
RT News reports that COVID’S origins became a highly political issue, with former president Donald Trump accusing Beijing of covering up the early stages of the pandemic and claiming it could have started with a leak at a government bioresearch facility. Beijing said the US was simply trying to shift the blame for its disastrous response to the pandemic.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Wuhan scientists planned to release coronavirus into bat caves: Leaked papers
COVID-19 Wuhan lab escape theory gets a second look
Biden shuts down US State efforts to find a Wuhan lab leak