Photographer: Go Nakamura / Getty Images
Photographer: Go Nakamura / Getty Images
The State Department said Friday it had new information suggesting the Covid-19 pandemic could have arisen from a Chinese lab and not from contact with infected animals, the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s efforts to get Beijing. about the origin of the virus.
In particular, the US said it had obtained new evidence that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill in the fall of 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak in the surrounding city, with symptoms they believe were consistent with COVID-19. or common seasonal illnesses.
The department said China’s lack of transparency about the origins of the pandemic more than a year ago, as well as efforts to mask early flaws in the country’s response to the outbreak, make it difficult to draw firm conclusions. But the brief, unsigned US statement – less than a week before the end of the Trump administration – provided no data to back up their claims.
The virus may have arisen naturally from human contact with infected animals and spread in a pattern similar to a natural epidemic, the State Department said. “Alternatively, a laboratory accident may resemble a natural outbreak if the initial exposure included only a few individuals and was exacerbated by asymptomatic infection.”
A State Department spokesman declined to elaborate when asked for further comment.
China has repeatedly dismissed allegations that the virus may have come from a lab. The US has not said how it got the new information on diseases in the laboratory.
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The comments, in a State Department fact sheet, are because China has been criticized for initially preventing some members of a World Health Organization mission from entering China as part of an effort to trace the origin of Covid-19, saying that they had not endured health impressions. Although the experts were eventually cleared, China had already been criticized by the WHO for delaying the mission’s plans to visit the country.
China has been closely watched since the outbreak exploded in and around Wuhan, but the Trump administration also tried to put more blame on Beijing authorities after the pandemic started in the US and the number of deaths soared. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo often refer to the disease as the ‘China virus’, ‘China plague’ and ‘Wuhan virus’.
China, in turn, is campaigning to cast doubt on whether the virus originated within its borders. State media has played up research suggesting there were cases in Italy and the US that predate the one in Wuhan, and hinted that the pathogen could have entered the country through frozen food or packaging.
On Friday, it was announced that 2 million people worldwide have died in the outbreak, with nearly 400,000 deaths in the US.