Covid controversy erupts between China and the US
Beijing’s white paper blames Washington for pandemic after the White House rolls out ‘Lab Leak’ website
Beijing and Washington are not just locked in a tumultuous trade war. They are also involved in a geopolitical row over the origins of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.
In an 8,000-word white paper released earlier this week, China blamed the United States for the global outbreak that first surfaced in the Chinese city of Wuhan in 2019.
“Substantial evidence suggested [that] Covid-19 might have emerged in the United States earlier than its officially-claimed timeline, and earlier than the outbreak in China,” the study revealed as reported by the Xinhua News Agency, the ruling Communist Party’s mouthpiece.
The white paper was rolled out just days after the Trump White House had launched a website on the source of the coronavirus to pedal the “lab leak theory.”
“Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research – [or] gene altering and organism supercharging – at inadequate biosafety levels,” Lab Leak, The True Origins of Covid-19 stated.
“Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers were sick with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before Covid-19 was discovered at [a nearby] wet market,” the White House website pointed out last weekend.
The entire nightmare for three-plus years was entirely avoidable.
Marty Makary, US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner
Flashback:
- A 2023 report into the source of the epidemic stressed that Covid-infected animals were being sold at a Huanan wet market in Wuhan.
- A pre-print study by an international team of researchers fleshed out the analysis.
- It included unseen genomic samples collected by Chinese scientists in Wuhan in 2019.
Delve deeper: Nearly 778 million people were infected by Covid-19. More than seven million people died worldwide, the World Health Organization reported.
Between the lines: An official at China’s National Health Commission insisted the next step in tracing the origins of the pathogen should focus on the US, according to Xinhua.
Big picture: But Marty Makary, the US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, felt that would be a waste of time after appearing to back the White House’s new Covid website.
Bottom line: “I think people want some closure. The entire nightmare for three-plus years was likely entirely avoidable, had we not [been] messing with Mother Nature in a way that they should not have,” he told Fox News, speculating on Chinese researchers.
China Factor comment: In 2023, we pointed out that the Chinese government had “buried crucial Covid-19 data.” One report showed that “facts were suppressed, stymieing investigations” into the source of the virus. Two years later, we are still in the dark.