China says ‘politicising’ COVID origins impedes investigation

Chinese embassy in Washington, DC claims there is a fixation on ‘political manipulation’ after President Biden orders intelligence review of virus’s origins.

Politicising the origins of COVID-19 would hamper further investigations and undermine global efforts to curb the pandemic, the Chinese embassy in the United States said after President Joe Biden ordered a review of US intelligence about how and where the virus first emerged. “Some political forces have been fixated on political manipulation and (the) blame game,” the embassy in Washington, DC said in a statement on its website on Wednesday evening. The World Health Organization (WHO) is preparing to begin a second phase of studies into the origins of COVID-19, and China has been under pressure to give investigators more access amid allegations that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a research laboratory in the city of Wuhan, where the first COVID-19 cases emerged in late 2019.