Beijing has claimed that America, not China, is to blame for the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a white paper released on Wednesday, China’s State Council Information Office suggested the virus that killed 1.2 million Americans and at least 7 million people worldwide may have originated in the United States.
The document appears to be a rebuttal to renewed backlash from the Trump campaign, which has doubled down on claims that Covid leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a lab known to be conducting coronavirus experiments.
The white paper released by China’s State Council Information Office was meant to rebut the Trump Administration which has claimed the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) which was doing coronavirus experiments at the time.
In the report, Chinese officials wrote: ‘The US government, instead of facing squarely its failure in response to Covid-19 and reflecting on its shortcomings, has tried to shift the blame and divert people’s attention by shamelessly politicizing SARS-CoV-2 origins tracing.
‘A thorough and in-depth investigation into the origins of the virus should be conducted in the United States. The United States should respond to the reasonable concern of the international community, and give a responsible answer to the world.’
The report goes on to say: ‘Substantial evidence suggested the COVID-19 might have emerged in the United States earlier than its officially-claimed timeline, and earlier than the outbreak in China.’
Many virologists and epidemiologists still believe that the coronavirus emerged in the human population after being transmitted between various animal hosts.
The Chinese government said in its latest report that the US should not continue to ‘pretend to be deaf and dumb,’ but should respond to the legitimate concerns of the international community.
The report comes after the White House launched a new Covid website earlier this month, where the official line is that the coronavirus escaped from the WIV labs while criticizing former President Joe Biden and top infectious disease specialist Dr Anthony Fauci.
The Chinese government wrote in its white paper that in January 2020, ‘the US was aware that an epidemic of a novel coronavirus was spreading quickly within its borders’ and chose to ‘downplay the severity of the epidemic… [on] multiple occasions compared Covid-19 to the flu, saying that it would disappear automatically one day.
‘The US has made China the primary scapegoat for its own mismanaged Covid-19 response. The US government’s indifference and delayed actions wasted the precious time China had secured for the global fight against the pandemic.’
The white paper goes on to allege that the virus has its roots in US soil, detailing respiratory disease outbreaks from May to October 2019 that the Chinese government alleges were Covid cases, though lab test results never concluded this.
‘A US CDC study revealed that out of 7,389 serological survey samples collected from nine states between December 13, 2019 and January 17, 2020, 106 were SARS-CoV-2 antibody positive. This suggests that the virus existed in the US before the first official case was identified,’ the white paper said.
