WASHINGTON, DC — President Joe Biden said Friday that
China was withholding "critical information" on the origins of COVID-19
after the US intelligence community said it did not believe the virus was a
bioweapon — but remained split on whether it escaped from a lab.
اضافة اعلان
The United States, however, does not believe Chinese
officials had foreknowledge of the virus before the initial outbreak of the
pandemic that has now claimed 4.5 million lives, according to the unclassified
summary of an eagerly awaited intelligence report.
"Critical information about the origins of this
pandemic exists in the People's Republic of China (PRC), yet from the
beginning, government officials in China have worked to prevent international
investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing
it," Biden said in a statement.
"To this day, the PRC continues to reject calls for
transparency and withhold information, even as the toll of this pandemic
continues to rise."
US intelligence has ruled out that the coronavirus was
developed as a weapon, and most agencies assess with "low confidence"
it was not genetically engineered.
But the community remains divided on the pathogen's origins,
with four agencies and the National Intelligence Council judging in favor of
natural exposure to an animal as the likely explanation, and one agency
favoring the lab
leak theory.
Analysts at three agencies were unable to reach a
conclusion.
"Variations in analytic views largely stem from
differences in how agencies weigh intelligence reporting and scientific
publications, and intelligence and scientific gaps," the summary said.
The intelligence community and global scientists lack
clinical samples or epidemiological
data from the earliest COVID-19 cases, it
added.
Biden said the United States would continue to work with
allies to press Beijing to share more information and cooperate with the World
Health Organization (WHO).
"We must have a full and transparent accounting of this
global tragedy. Nothing less is acceptable," he said.
The office of the director of national intelligence said it
was reviewing de-classifying parts of the report in the near future, in light
of the historic nature of the pandemic and the importance of informing the
public, while protecting its sources and methods.
Lab leak fading
Beijing has rejected calls from the United States and other
countries for a renewed origin probe after a heavily politicized visit by a WHO
team in January also proved inconclusive, and faced criticism for lacking
transparency and access.
In a statement Friday, the Chinese embassy in Washington
slammed the US intelligence community's findings, defending its handling of the
pandemic and the WHO investigation.
"The report by the US intelligence community shows that
the US is bent on going down the wrong path of political manipulation,"
the embassy said in a statement.
"The report by the intelligence community is based on
the presumption of guilt on the part of China, and it is only for scapegoating
China."
At the outset of the pandemic, the natural origin hypothesis
— that the virus emerged in bats and then passed to humans, likely via an
intermediary species — was widely accepted.
But as time wore on and scientists were unable to find a
virus in either bats or another animal that matches the genetic signature of
SARS-CoV-2, investigators said they were more open to considering a leak
involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which carried out bat coronavirus
research.
Recent scientific papers, however, are tilting the debate
back towards a zoonotic origin.
Researchers in China and the University of Glasgow published
a paper in the journal Science that found "animal-to-human transmission
associated with infected live animals is the most likely cause of the COVID-19
pandemic."
Additionally, a paper by 21 top virologists in the journal
Cell bluntly concluded: "There is currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2
has a laboratory origin."
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