New probe on coronavirus origins slammed

China rejected new attempts to politicize the origins of COVID-19, repeating that experts from the World Health Organization had already concluded that a "lab leak" was "extremely unlikely."

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian was responding to reports that US President Joe Biden's call for a US-based probe into the origins of COVID-19. Biden gave the US intelligence agencies 90 days to report on whether the virus originated from an animal source or from a laboratory accident, calling on China to cooperate with international investigations.

The international expert team of the joint WHO-China study has made positive comments on China's open and transparent attitude on many occasions, Zhao said. However, some people in the United States have repeatedly called for a reinvestigation of China, ignoring the facts and science, as well as the questions surrounding their own traceability and their tragic failure in the COVID-19 fight.

This shows that the US side doesn't care about the facts or the truth, and is not interested in serious scientific origin tracing, he added.

Zhao also said the US must open itself up to investigations into its biological laboratories, including at the Naval Medical Research Center's Biological Defense Research Directorate at Fort Detrick in Maryland.

"The US side claims that it wants China to participate in a comprehensive, transparent, evidence-based international investigation," Zhao said. "We would like to ask the US side to do the same as China and immediately cooperate with the WHO on origin tracing research in a scientific manner."