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US says China’s poor Covid transparency has led to lack of consensus in America on disease’s origin
- Beijing to blame, Biden administration argues, amid criticism over agencies’ disparate assessments on whether coronavirus resulted from Chinese lab
- ‘PRC has been blocking, from the beginning, international investigators and members of the global health community,’ State Department adds
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Robert Delaneyin Washington
Officials in US President Joe Biden’s administration on Monday turned the blame on China for a lack of consensus among US government agencies over the origin of the coronavirus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
Biden officials have faced criticism that the US Department of Energy’s reported “low confidence” assessment that Sars-CoV-2 resulted from a Chinese lab accident throws previous assessments ordered by the administration into doubt. The department said previously that it was undecided on how the virus emerged.
“There is not a consensus right now in the US government about exactly how Covid started. There is just not an intelligence community consensus,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters during a White House press briefing. “The work is still ongoing.”
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“We have consistently made it clear that we want China’s full cooperation in a full transparent way with the investigations into Covid, including when [Biden] met with President Xi [Jinping] in Bali just a couple of months ago,” Kirby said.
While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in 2021 that exposure to an animal that carried the contagion – known as zoonotic spillover – was a likely cause of the first human Covid-19 infection, the agency also left open the possibility that it was the result of “a laboratory-associated incident”.
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