BEIJING (Bloomberg): China accused the US of promoting theories that the coronavirus escaped from a high-security lab in Wuhan, as a fresh report about sick workers at the facility prompted Beijing to reaffirm denials.
"The report that you mentioned about three people getting sick, that is not true, ” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a regular briefing Monday (May 24) in Beijing.
Zhao was responding to a Wall Street Journal report that a trio of researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology -- a lab in the central city where the first Covid-19 outbreak was identified -- had fallen ill and sought hospital care in November 2019.
The facility has previously denied claims of workers getting sick, including a US State Department fact sheet published in January that asserts that several researchers from the institute became sick in autumn 2019. Zhao said the US has been hyping the lab-leak theory.
China has sought to frame the claims as conspiracy theories created to divert attention from the US government’s own handling of the coronavirus, and suggested that a military base in the US state of Maryland should be investigated.
"There is suspicion about the activities at Fort Detrick and the more than 200 biolabs run by the US, ” Zhao said at the briefing.
"The US has been hyping up the theory of a lab leak but does it really care about the study of origin tracing or is it trying to divert attention?
"We hope relevant US departments can make a clarification and give the world a clear answer.”
While the World Health Organization-led investigation in China earlier this year found it was "extremely unlikely” the coronavirus came from a laboratory leak, scientists have sought more data.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said following the probe that it didn’t adequately analyse the possibility of a lab accident, adding that he is ready to deploy additional resources.
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