WH Seeking 'to Smear' Beijing as 'Source of Coronavirus' Ahead of US Intel Probe, Chinese Media Says

Last week, China rejected the World Health Organisation's (WHO) call "to work together" on a second investigation into the origins of COVID-19, insisting that the initial WHO-led inquiry in March was enough to understand how "the worst pandemic in a century" began.

The state-run Chinese tabloid Global Times has claimed that the US is running a campaign "to smear China as the source of the coronavirus".

The newspaper also accused Washington of "feeding the media with fabricated evidence", suggesting that the World Health Organisation (WHO) has been put under pressure by the US and its allies.

The accusations come a week after China refused to collaborate with the UN health body on a second probe into the origins of COVID-19, arguing that the initial WHO-led inquiry in March was sufficient and that Beijing prefers scientific to political efforts to deal with the issue.

An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory (L) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on April 17, 2020

© AFP 2023 / HECTOR RETAMAL

Сhinese Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu underscored that "the conclusions and recommendations" of a joint report by the WHO and China were recognised by both the international and scientific communities.

Ma argued that "future global traceability work should and can only be further carried out on the basis of this report, rather than starting a new one".

In the document, the WHO concluded that the possibility of the virus having leaked from a state laboratory in Wuhan's Institute of Virology (WIV) was "extremely unlikely". The UN body's experts claimed there was a high possibility that the virus was transmitted to humans from bats via another animal.

China's National Health Commission, for its part, stressed that Beijing perceives the WHO's criteria for the second phase of the investigation into the origins of the coronavirus as insulting and will not follow them.

"Scientists have reached a consensus that COVID-19 is of a natural origin. Experts have published a statement saying that there is no evidence of the artificial origin of COVID-19 and its leak from the laboratory", the commission's representative told reporters.

China Calls for Probe Into Fort Detrick Lab in US

They spoke amid reports that Beijing is intensifying efforts to make the WHO open an investigation into a US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Earlier, the Global Times released what it described as email correspondence between the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials at USAMRIID from 2018 to 2019, which revealed several violations at the Fort Detrick lab during the CDC's inspections in 2019.

The tabloid cited an unnamed source as claiming that "some highly pathogenic" viruses in the laboratory "were likely released" as a result of the alleged violations. The source also accused the American military of "never" telling the public "about what they were doing".

Earlier this month, US media outlets reported that American intelligence agencies had gotten their hands on genetic blueprint data from virus samples being studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virolog, studying the information to see if it can help uncover COVID's origins. Media reports said the sensitive information may have been hacked from computers connected to external cloud-based servers involved in creating and processing the data.

After the coronavirus outbreak became a global pandemic in 2020, the US accused China of scrubbing genetic data from the estimated 22,000 virus samples being studied at the Wuhan lab from the internet, and charged Beijing with refusing to hand the information over to the US or the WHO.

The US intelligence community, meanwhile, remains at odds over the origins of the coronavirus as time is ticking for the expiration of a deadline related to a 90-day probe into the matter, ordered by President Joe Biden in May.

Some suggest that the virus originated from a Wuhan bio lab, while others claim it jumped naturally from animals to humans. US intelligence officials have reportedly drafted a classified report, but its current version purportedly contains "nothing too earth shattering" on the matter.

Beijing has repeatedly rejected the Wuhan lab-leak theory, calling on Washington to stop politicising the issue and insisting that the coronavirus may have emanated from a US Army lab.