BEIJING (Reuters) -China restated its case that COVID-19 may have originated in the United States in a white paper on its pandemic response released on Wednesday after President Donald Trump’s administration blamed a lab leak in China.
The White House launched a COVID-19 website on April 18 in which it said the coronavirus came from a lab leak in China while criticising former President Joe Biden, former top U.S. health official Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization.
In the white paper, released by the official Xinhua news agency, China accused the U.S. of politicising the matter of the origins of COVID-19. It cited a Missouri lawsuit which resulted in a $24 billion ruling against China for hoarding protective medical equipment and covering up the outbreak.
China shared relevant information with the WHO and the international community in a timely manner, the white paper said, emphasising that a joint study by the WHO and China had concluded that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely”.
The U.S. should not continue to “pretend to be deaf and dumb”, but should respond to the legitimate concerns of the international community, the white paper said.
“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,” it said.
The CIA said in January the pandemic was more likely to have emerged from a lab in China than from nature, after the agency had for years said it could not reach a conclusion on the matter. It said it had “low confidence” in its new assessment and noted that both lab origin and natural origin remain plausible.
An official at China’s National Health Commission said the next step in origin-tracing work should focus on the U.S., according to Xinhua, which cited a statement about the white paper.
(Reporting by Xiuhao Chen, Ethan Wang and Joe Cash; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Philippa Fletcher)
