Китай отверг версию США о лабораторном происхождении COVID

it is necessary to stop discrediting China and politicizing the issue of the origin of the CORONAVIRUS, declaring a possible leak of covid-19 from a Chinese laboratory, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a briefing. Her words are given on the website of the ministry.

The diplomat recalled that the joint scientific group of the World HEALTH Organization (WHO) and China came to the conclusion that such an origin of the coronavirus is unlikely, the international community and the scientific community agreed with this.

The US Department of Energy believes that the coronavirus spread due to a leak from a Chinese laboratory, sources told The Wall Street Journal last week. Previously, a similar theory was proposed to be considered as “plausible” by the national laboratory of the US government, it was also supported by the FBI, but national intelligence expressed doubts about this version. Four more intelligence agencies support the natural theory of the origin of the virus, two have not decided, the newspaper specifies. “Right now, there is no consensus within the US government on exactly how COVID started,” White House spokesman John Kirby said in late February.

WHO, after the start of the pandemic, launched an investigation into the origin of the infection. Already in February of that year, the organization announced China's refusal to provide the necessary initial data on 174 cases of coronavirus that were detected in the city of Wuhan in December 2019. Based on available data, WHO experts considered that a laboratory origin was "highly unlikely".

Further, Beijing refused to help the WHO investigate the version of a laboratory leak and accused the organization of political posturing. The HEAD of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, admitted that the virus could have appeared in a Chinese laboratory: “I myself was a laboratory assistant, I am an immunologist, I worked in a laboratory and I know that incidents happen in the laboratory. It happens". Further research into the origin of the virus was suspended by the WHO due to opposition from China.