China has rejected the theory attributed to the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic to a laboratory leak in Wuhan. This response arises after the publication of a recent report by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which indicates this hypothesis as plausible to explain the global health crisis.
The conclusion of the CIA is based on recent evaluations on the pre -existing tests of the characteristics of the virus, its propagation mechanisms and the conditions of the Virology laboratories in China. The report does not include new data and assigns a low degree of confidence to this deduction. CIA itself indicates that The available evidences are insufficient, ambiguous or contradictory.
“[Nuestro equipo] It continues to consider that both the scenarios of origin related to the investigation and those of natural origin of the Pandemia of Covid-19 are still plausible, ”he clarifies in a statement. The review of these investigations was carried out at the request of the administration of Joe Biden and William Burns, former director of the CIA. John Ratcliffe, current head of the agency, ordered the decalcification and dissemination of the document.
High Chinese officials have disqualified the reports of the report. Mao NO, spokesman for the China Ministry of Foreign Affairs, affirms that “the Joint Expert Team of China and the World Health Organization (WHO) came to the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that [el covid-19] It has occurred by a leak in a laboratory. This has been widely recognized by the international scientific community. “
For his part, Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, accused that the CIA tries to use the issue for political purposes. “We firmly oppose the politicization and stigmatization of the origin of the virus. Once again we call everyone to respect science and stay away from conspiracy theories, ”he says in a statement recovered by the agency The Associated Press.
The origin of COVID-19 is still unknown: WHO
The scientific guild is still divided over the origin of the pathogen. A part argues that the infectious agent, like other coronavirus, would have had as an initial guest to fruit bats, before mutating and infecting other species such as mapache dogs, civetas and bamboo rats. According to this conjecture, the COVID-19 would have transmitted to people who manipulated infected animals in a market in the province of Wuhan, where the first mass outbreak in humans was recorded at the end of 2019.
Other investigations have raised, in contrast, that the pandemic could originate from failures in the security of a local laboratory. In March 2023, the United States Department of Energy concluded that an accidental escape at the Center for Disease Control in Wuhan, which was studying a variant of the Coronavirus, could be responsible for the outbreak. Nevertheless, This conclusion was also issued with low levels of trustsituation that fueled the discrepancies between the agencies, scientists and academics trying to discover the origin of COVID-19.
WHO declared in 2021 that the theory of animal origin was the most likely. Despite this, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, general director of the organization, emphasized that “all hypotheses are still on the table. We have not found the origin of the virus and we must continue investigatingalways based on science and any possibility. ”
At the end of last year, the highest international health authority urged China to share the data it has collected on the origin of the virus to advance research. “It is a moral and scientific imperative. Without transparency and international cooperation, we cannot prevent or prepare properly for future epidemics and pandemics, ”the entity warned.
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