On the day in which the Chamber inaugurates the work of the bipartisan Commission on China on prime time TV, one of the few areas in which Republicans and Democrats move in sync, FBI director Chris Wray relaunches the accusations against Beijing on the origin of Covid .
In an interview with Fox News, Wray said that Covid was probably caused “by a laboratory accident in Wuhan”. However, the Chinese government, he continued, has prevented by all means the shed light and has cast shadows on every investigation and evaluation that America and experts from other countries were carrying out. According to Wray, it will be almost impossible to arrive at a definitive truth precisely because of the lack of cooperation from China.
The FBI is the second American agency in a few days to reveal the “founded suspicion” about the origin of Covid in the laboratory. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the Department of Energy is aligned on the same line. However, there is no consensus in the Biden administration. The coordinator of National Security, John Kirby, on Monday in the usual briefing with journalists, highlighted that the opinions of the various agencies on the genesis of Covid differ and that Biden has asked for in-depth analysis, facts and assessments.
A report commissioned by Biden from national intelligence and released in August 2021 very conservatively associated the genesis of the virus with a laboratory accident. And even then the analysis had not found unanimity in the American agencies. Eighteen US government agencies help form the intelligence community.
China has responded indignantly to the US Energy Department’s accusations. And a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Mao Ning, said that Beijing “has always been transparent and open”. Then he mentioned a 2021 World Health Organization report that said it was “highly unlikely” that the virus had grown in a lab. However, even then the United States and other countries had criticized the WHO report accusing China of having omitted data.
However, in its document, the Energy Department points out that there is a consensus that Covid is not the product of Chinese attempts to build a biological weapon. What happened, again according to the US reconstruction, in the Wuhan laboratory is an accident.
In a briefing with some foreign newspapers including La Stampa, the Deputy Secretary of Energy David M. Turk yesterday specified that the National Lab experts and analysts involved in the study on Covid are working to understand what happened “to avoid the recurrence of pandemic situations in the future”. So he hoped that “China will do the same” and make the same commitment. “We are frustrated – he concluded – that we do not have independent and international experts on site who can have a full account of what is happening”.
The question of the genesis of Covid is politically sensitive. The deputies who spoke to the bilateral commission on China underlined the importance of reaching a truth since it is not a question “only of finding out what happened but also of preventing other catastrophes”. If – instead said the Republican senator from Maine, Susan Collins – it were to be confirmed that Covid is the result of a leak from the laboratory, then “this would have an impact on American policy”, towards China.