Chinese officials have no interest in allowing international inspectors into the Wuhan lab that some U.S. officials regard as a potential origin of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Any objective person will see that some U.S. politicians have been peddling lies that discredit China’s anti-epidemic efforts to fuddle people’s minds and deflect attention from the fact that they fell short of fulfilling their own anti-epidemic responsibilities,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Thursday.
That statement was offered in direct response to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s call for inspections of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other labs where Chinese scientists study coronaviruses and other pathogens. Some suspect that the pandemic contagion leaked out of a science lab, a finding that would deepen Beijing’s responsibility for the crisis that has paralyzed many countries.
“It’s not just the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Pompeo said Wednesday. “There were multiple labs inside of China that are handling these things. It’s important that those materials are being handled in a safe and secure way, such that there isn’t an accidental release.”
Those remarks dovetail with the suspicions of Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and longtime ally of Pompeo. “While the Chinese government denies the possibility of a lab leak, its actions tell a different story,” Cotton wrote in a Tuesday op-ed. “This evidence is circumstantial, to be sure, but it all points toward the Wuhan labs.”
Pompeo proposed the lab inspections while rebuking the World Health Organization on the grounds that the international agency has failed to demand sufficient transparency from China Communist Party officials during the crisis.
“The CCP still has not shared the virus sample from inside of China with the outside world, making it impossible to track the disease’s evolution,” Pompeo said Wednesday. “The World Health Organization’s regulatory arm clearly failed during this pandemic.”
Chinese officials deny any wrongdoing in response to the coronavirus despite previously admitting to “obvious shortcomings” such as the punishment of the doctors who first tried to sound the alarm about the new virus.
“Facts speak louder than words,” Geng insisted Thursday. “China has taken timely, swift, and efficient epidemic prevention and control measures in an open, transparent and responsible manner.”
