Sharjah24 – Reuters: A declassified U.S. intelligence report saying it was plausible that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a laboratory is unscientific and has no credibility, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said in a statement on Sunday.
The updated U.S. intelligence briefing, published on Saturday, said that a natural origin and a lab leak were both plausible hypotheses to explain how SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, first infected humans, but that the truth may never be known.
In a response Sunday on the website of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Wang said "a lie repeated a thousand times is still a lie", adding that U.S. intelligence services "have a reputation for fraud and deception."
"The tracing of the origins of the novel coronavirus is a serious and complex issue that should and can only be researched through the cooperation of global scientists," he said.
China has consistently denied allegations that the virus was leaked from a specialist laboratory in the city of Wuhan, where COVID-19 was first identified at the end of 2019.
Wang also repeated China's calls for the United States to open up its own laboratory at Fort Detrick to international experts.
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