Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/Kevin Frayer
Topics: China, US News, Donald Trump, Health
Emily Brown
Topics: China, US News, Donald Trump, Health
China has issued a shocking claim about the origins of Covid-19 after a spokesperson for the CIA announced that the global outbreak had likely been the result of a lab leak.
The CIA made its announcement after Donald Trump's pick for director, John Ratcliffe, officially stepped into his new role earlier this year.
There is no globally-accepted explanation for the cause of the outbreak, but as he took control Ratcliffe announced that he wanted the CIA to 'get off the sidelines' when it came to its opinion on the matter.
In an interview with Breitbart News, he said: "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.
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"That's a day-one thing for me."
In January, the CIA said Covid-19 was 'more likely' to have leaked from a Chinese lab than it is to have come from animals, according to the 'available body of reporting'.
The White House doubled down on this claim when it launched a web page with the bold words 'LAB LEAK', followed by: "The true origins of Covid-19."
The website lists a series of claims to back its argument about the lab leak, including that Wuhan is 'home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research', and that researchers were 'sick with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019'.
In response to the US' allegations, China released a paper via the official Xinhua news agency in which it accused the US of politicizing the matter of the origins of Covid-19, and noted that a joint study by the WHO and China had concluded that a lab leak was 'extremely unlikely'.
According to CNN, China accused the US of 'pretend[ing] to be deaf and dumb', before suggesting that Covid-19 may have been present in the US before the outbreak in China.
They claim in a white paper that 'mysterious “e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury” cases' in Illinois and Wisconsin, before the start of the original Wuhan outbreak, were actually Covid.
They also suggested that cases of flu in South Carolina from September 2019 were Covid, and that 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 its paper, China wrote: “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 at China’s National Health Commission also argued that the next step in tracing the origin of the virus should focus on the US.