China fires back at WHO's report on COVID-19 origins; accuses US of engineering bioweapons

China on Sunday strongly responded to the World Health Organisation's (WHO) suspicion of the COVID-19 pandemic originating from a Chinese lab and has labelled the theory as a "politically motivated lie". Earlier this week, the WHO advisory group had called for investigations into the lab-leak theory and suggested that the Huanan seafood market in China's Wuhan played a major role in amplifying the pandemic. In response, China's wolf warrior and Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said that these alleged lies are being woven by "anti-China forces".

"The lab leak theory is totally a lie concocted by anti-China forces for political purposes, which has nothing to do with science", Lijian said during a daily briefing as per The Associated Press. 

China fires back; calls for investigation in US-based labs

While rejecting the claims of the virus leaking from a Chinese lab, Lijian said that China does not support any political manipulation and would only accept a science-based probe. "We always supported and participated in science-based global virus tracing, but we firmly opposed any forms of political manipulation". He even rejected the accusations of non-cooperation from China in the investigations regarding the origins of COVID-19 and called for investigations in US-based labs similar to those in Wuhan.

Asserting that US-based labs such as Fort Derrick and the University of North Carolina need to be scrutinised, the spokesperson even went on to allege that the US is engineering its own coronavirus to make bioweapons. During the briefing, Lijian even said that China has openly supported virus tracing, and has shared crucial data and research results. On the contrary, the WHO report released on Thursday claimed that the "key pieces of data" to explain the origins of the coronavirus are missing. Notably, this U-turn by the WHO comes a year after it visited Wuhan for investigations and stated afterward that it was “extremely unlikely” for a virus to emerge from a lab and spread among humans.

As for the deaths due to the pandemic, a WHO report released in March estimated that the full death toll associated directly or indirectly with the COVID-19 pandemic between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2021, was approximately 14.9 million (range of 13.3 million to 16.6 million).