United States President Joe Biden said on Friday (27) that the Chinese government was omitting information crucial to understanding the origin of the coronavirus. The statement came after the Democrat gained access to reports from U.S. intelligence agencies on the emergence of the virus.
“There is crucial information about the origins of this pandemic in the People’s Republic of China, but from the start, Chinese government officials have worked to prevent international researchers and members of the global public health community from have access to it, ”Biden said. .
In total, nine US agencies have investigated the origin of the coronavirus. Four intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council believe the animal emergence hypothesis is more likely. However, another intelligence agency claims there is a moderate level of confidence that the virus emerged in the lab. Three other agencies do not comment on any of the possibilities.
However, all agencies agree that it is highly unlikely that the coronavirus was created to be a biological weapon.
Before this investigation, only two agencies favored the hypothesis that Sars-Cov-2 is of natural origin. Despite this, the report states that this hypothesis has a low level of confidence, indicating that new answers may be given in other surveys.
Agencies say they cannot obtain new information on the origins of the virus if they do not access more data, especially samples from the first cases of Covid-19 in Wuhan. According to the New York Times, some U.S. officials believe Chinese researchers have better access to these samples and that Xi Jinping’s government is banning investigations into the origin of the coronavirus for fear of what could be discovered.
In response, the Chinese Embassy in Washington claimed that the US intelligence services were engaging in political manipulation and making China a scapegoat.
Last Wednesday (25), researchers from the WHO (World Health Organization) who produced a report in March 2021 on the origin of the coronavirus published an article in the scientific journal Nature with a call for further investigations. They say further delays could make it impossible to perform some biological experiments essential to find out how the pathogen came about.
About 4.5 million people have died from Covid-19 since the first official case in December 2019. In Brazil, the total was 578,396 deaths and 20,703,645 people infected, according to data from the press vehicle consortium including Folha is part.
With AFP and The New York Times