China has criticized the “politicization” of US efforts to establish the origin of the coronavirus and demanded an investigation in a US military laboratory. This happened shortly before the forthcoming release of a declassified version of the report of the American intelligence community on this issue, according to Reuters.
“China’s transformation into a scapegoat cannot hide the mistakes of the United States,” said Fu Tsung, director general of the Foreign Ministry’s arms control department in Beijing.
The US report aims to clarify differences between intelligence agencies over various theories about the origin of the coronavirus, including a previously rejected theory about an incident in a Chinese laboratory.
The deadline for drafting the report expired on Monday, but the declassified version of the document will be prepared for public publication within a few days, a White House spokesman said. US President Joe Biden has already received a classified version of the document.
According to China, the virus is unlikely to have originated from a laboratory leak. Beijing also called the theory that the virus came from a laboratory in Wuhan, where the first cases of infection were detected in late 2019, which started the pandemic, absurd.
Instead, China predicts that the virus appeared in a laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 2019.
“It’s normal for the United States to insist that this is a real hypothesis and to invite researchers to its laboratories,” Fu said.