In a report on Sunday, the United Kingdoms Mail quoted an anonymous senior government source who claimed World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus believes that the COVID-19 epidemic is most likely to have originated from a catastrophic accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said the WHO Secretariat had clarified the matter to the Chinese side, emphasizing that the WHO chief had never made any such claims on public or private occasions. The contents of the report you cited were completely untrue, the spokesman told his questioner. The director-general insists that the lab leak hypothesis has nothing to do with science being a lie that the anti-China forces have fabricated for political purposes.
He also highlighted the fact that a WHO-dispatched team of international experts had made an inspection trip to the lab in Wuhan, and it had concluded that it was extremely unlikely that a leak from the lab was the source of the pandemic.
He brushed aside the newspaper report as malicious political manipulation intended to smear China, obstruct scientific source-tracing and international anti-pandemic cooperation.
He suggested that the United States had yet to respond to the international community's concerns about the earliest date of outbreak in the US, as well as activities at such highly suspicious labs as Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina. If any parties are concerned about ferreting out the novel coronaviruses' real origin, they should shift their attention to the US instead, he suggested.
There has been much speculation about the two US facilities being a possible source of the virus. The US government's refusal to allow any WHO inspection and its nonstop efforts to pin the blame on the Wuhan lab have only served to fuel suspicions that it has something to hide.
While tracing the origin of the outbreak would give us a better understanding of how the outbreak originated, spread, and evolved, the US refusal to allow any investigation on its soil means our understanding of the epidemic will be limited to what we know now.
If the international scientific community can't get rid of political interference and conduct an independent investigation into the origin of the virus, the risks of similar outbreaks in the future remain.
All the attempts at stonewalling science are against humanity.