An end of inadmissibility. China on Thursday rejected the WHO’s proposal to continue the investigation into the origin of the pandemic in the Asian country, where the world’s first patients with Covid-19 were identified at the end of 2019.
“A lack of respect for common sense”
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last week requested an audit of laboratories in areas where the first cases of coronavirus were identified – a reference to the Chinese city of Wuhan, a time ago epicenter of the epidemic. This Thursday, Chinese Vice Minister of Health Zeng Yixin said he was “extremely surprised” by this proposal. It is a “lack of respect for common sense and an arrogance towards science,” he said at a press conference.
China revealed to WHO on December 31, 2019 the existence of an outbreak of pneumonia cases in Wuhan. But Beijing has always fiercely fought the theory that Covid-19 could have escaped from one of its laboratories, in particular those of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Long brushed aside by most experts, this theory brought to the United States by the former Trump administration has nevertheless come back in force in recent months in the American debate.
For Beijing, we should rather look at the side of the American laboratory Fort Detrick
For his part, one of the officials of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Yuan Zhiming, assured this Thursday that his establishment had not been the subject of “any leak” or “accident”.
The Chinese authorities and the country’s media, on the other hand, regularly point the finger at Fort Detrick, in the United States, as being at the origin of the Covid-19. Located near Washington, this laboratory is at the heart of American research against bioterrorism.
According to Global Times, a daily newspaper with a resolutely nationalist tone, 5 million Chinese Internet users have signed a petition for the opening of an investigation into Fort Detrick.