On Monday, China responded to a US CIA report linking the spread of the Corona Corona virus, the Kofid-19, with a leakage of a Chinese research laboratory.
“The joint experts team from China and the World Health Organization concluded that the laboratory leakage is largely excluded based on field visits to relevant laboratories in Wuhan,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning.
Mao added – in a press conference today – that “this was widely recognized by the international community and the scientific community.”
The Chinese spokeswoman called on the United States to “stop politicizing and exploiting the issue of searching for the assets of the pandemic, as well as stopping distortion and blame for other countries.”
A US CIA spokesman confirmed the day before yesterday that the agency concluded that the Kofid-19 pandemic had arisen in a laboratory and not in nature, but he confirmed that the agency has “low confidence” that weighting, and that “both scenarios are related to the research origin The natural Kofid-19 is still possible. “
Biden and Corona
The agency had said for years that it could not conclude if the pandemic was as a result of an accident in a laboratory or that it grew up in nature. But a senior US official said that former agency director William Burns asked analysts and scientists at the intelligence agency in recent weeks for the administration of former US President Joe Biden to make a clear decision in this regard, stressing the historical importance of the epidemic.
In an interview with the Praya News Platform after the US Senate confirmed his appointment on Friday, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, said that one of his first priorities is to conduct the agency as a general assessment of the origin of the pandemic.
He added, “This is something that should happen on the first day for me. I have already said that I believe that our intelligence, our knowledge, and our good good say that the Kofid-19 origins were a leakage at the Wuhan Institute for Virus.”
It is noteworthy that the previous reports on the assets of the Kofid-19 were divided over whether the virus had arisen from a Chinese laboratory, perhaps by mistake, or if it had appeared normally. The new CIA assessment is unlikely to resolve this controversy. Intelligence officials say that a final solution may never be reached, given the lack of cooperation of the Chinese authorities.
While the origin of the virus is still unknown, scientists believe that the most likely hypothesis is that it has spread between the bats, such as many Corona viruses, before moving to another type of animal, perhaps Rakan dogs, cushioning cats or mice. From there, the infection moved to humans who dealt with these animals or slaughtered them in a market in Wuhan, where the first human cases with the virus appeared in late November 2019.
However, some official investigations raised questions about whether the virus had leaked from the Wuhan Laboratory. Two years ago, a report issued by the Ministry of Energy concluded that a laboratory leak was the most likely origin, although the report also referred to low confidence in this conclusion.