Donald Trump’s diplomatic feud with China has escalated even further after he published a new government website claiming Covid-19 came from a lab in Wuhan.
The White House unveiled the new site on Saturday with a page dedicated to ‘The True Origins Of Covid-19’ – which blamed Beijing and former US administration figures for supporting false claims that Covid-19 started naturally in an animal market. Instead, the wesbite claims “researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before Covid-19 was discovered in the animal market.” It adds: “The federal government demonised alternative treatments and disavowed narratives, such as the lab leak theory, in a shameful attempt to coerce and control the health decisions of the American people“.
The website comes amid a dramatic tit-for-tat trade war between the US and China, which saw Trump drive up tariffs to 145% on imports from China.
It reads: “virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature”, before concluding: “By nearly all measures of science, if there were evidence of a natural origin, it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t.”
The website also slammed the World Health Organisation for its “abject failure” in responding to the pandemic, with the agency instead caving to “pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and placing China’s political interests ahead of its international duties”.
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In January, the CIA said the pandemic was more likely to have originated in a lab than in nature. At the start of the pandemic, a former spy chief had sent a secret dossier to Downing Street saying the virus came from a leak inside a Wuhan lab, the Mail on Sunday reports.
But Lord Vallance – chief scientific adviser at the time – is believed by sources to have dismissed the report, possibly out of fear of offending the Chinese or threatening research funding.
The dossier by Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, was passed to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson in March 2020. It said: “It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in Wuhan Institute of Virology”, and claimed Beijing was hiding behind the theory it had originated in an animal market.
A source close to Johnson said: “Boris repeatedly asked the [intelligence] agencies to do more work on the origins of Covid. It struck him as too much of a coincidence that a mutant Covid virus appeared in a city that just happened to possess one of the only labs in the world that engineered mutant Covid viruses.
He was very struck by the refusal of the scientists, especially Patrick Vallance, even to contemplate this possibility. He asked again after getting the Dearlove briefing, and again the agencies came back with the same answer and rubbished Dearlove.”
In response to the Trump’s website, China said there was no proof to back the claims that the pandemic came from a leak at a Wuhan facility, and accused the US President of politicising the issue.
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