China has put forth a startling assertion regarding the origins of Covid-19 following a statement from a CIA spokesperson, claiming that the pandemic likely resulted from a laboratory leak.
This announcement by the CIA came after John Ratcliffe, appointed by Donald Trump as the new CIA director, assumed his duties earlier this year.
While there is no universally accepted explanation for the outbreak’s origins, Ratcliffe emphasized that he wanted the CIA to actively participate in forming an opinion on the issue as he took charge.
In a conversation with Breitbart News, Ratcliffe stated: “One of the things that I’ve talked about a lot is addressing the threat from China on a number of fronts, and that goes back to why a million Americans died and why the Central Intelligence Agency has been sitting on the sidelines for five years in not making an assessment about the origins of Covid.
“That’s a day-one thing for me.”
In January, the CIA suggested that it was ‘more likely’ Covid-19 emerged from a Chinese lab rather than an animal source, based on the ‘available body of reporting’.
The White House supported this claim by unveiling a webpage with the prominent words ‘LAB LEAK’, followed by the statement: “The true origins of Covid-19.”
The site outlines various points to substantiate its lab leak theory, such as Wuhan hosting ‘China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research’, and that lab employees displayed ‘Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019’.
In retaliation to the US’s claims, China published a paper through the Xinhua news agency, accusing the US of politicizing Covid-19’s origins and referring to a joint study by WHO and China, which stated a lab leak was ‘extremely unlikely’.
CNN reported that China accused the US of ‘pretend[ing] to be deaf and dumb’, further suggesting that Covid-19 could have been in the US before the outbreak in China.
In a white paper, they argued that ‘mysterious “e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury” cases’ observed in Illinois and Wisconsin before the Wuhan outbreak were actually Covid cases.
They also proposed that flu cases detected in South Carolina from September 2019 were Covid, and claimed the virus ‘was circulating across the US at a low level as early as December 2019, well before the first official cases were recorded’.
In the document, China stated: “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.”
An official from China’s National Health Commission also suggested that further investigation into the virus’s origins should focus on the US.