With news that COVID-19 appeared in the US as early as December 2019, Beijing is now all but accusing the Biden administration of covering up America being part of the international "multiple origins" of the virus, and is demanding that the global medical community focus on America's part in spreading the virus globally.
A senior Chinese epidemiologist said the United States should be the priority in the next phase of investigations into the origin of COVID-19 after a study showed the disease could have been circulating there as early as December 2019, state media said on Thursday.
The study, published this week by the U.S. National Institutes for Health (NIH), showed that at least seven people in five U.S. states were infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, weeks before the United States reported its first official cases.
A China-World Health Organization (WHO) joint study published in March said COVID-19 most likely originated in the country's wildlife trade, with the virus passing into humans from bats via an intermediary species.
But Beijing has promoted the theory that COVID-19 entered China from overseas via contaminated frozen food, while a number of foreign politicians are also calling for more investigations into the possibility it leaked from a laboratory.
Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told state-owned tabloid the Global Times that attention should shift to the United States, which was slow to test people in the early stages of the outbreak, and is also the home of many biological laboratories.
"All bio-weapons related subjects that the country has should be subject to scrutiny," he was quoted as saying.
Commenting on the U.S. study on Wednesday, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said it was now "obvious" the COVID-19 outbreak had "multiple origins" and that other countries should co-operate with the WHO.
It's nonsense of course, it just means that the virus got across from China weeks earlier than originally caught, which we knew last year. On the other hand, Trump's response to the virus was so incompetent that the US can't really say that it wasn't part of the problem of global spread of the virus...and let's remember that so far it's killed over 600,000 Americans.
On top of all that, tens of millions of American refused to get vaccinated. China doesn't really have to do much of anything if this is a bio-weapon that got loose, because our own ignorance will kill millions over the next few years as the virus continues to mutate into more lethal strains.
China has all the reason it needs to blame the US. We elected Trump, after all. Why wouldn't some believe them?
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