China says it has been “open and transparent” in the search for the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and dismissed United States criticism as politicising the issue.
China had “shared the most data and research results on virus tracing and made important contributions to global virus tracing research”, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning Mao told reporters at a daily briefing.
“Politicising the issue of virus tracing will not smear China but will only damage the US’s own credibility,” Mao said, in response to complaints from US officials and members of Congress that China has not been entirely cooperative.
Her comments came amid continuing questions about how the virus that has killed more than 6.8 million people worldwide first emerged.
Others in the US intelligence community disagree, citing differing opinions within the government.
“There is just not an intelligence community consensus,” John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said on Monday.
A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion.
The latest assessment further adds to the divide in the US government over whether the COVID-19 pandemic began in China in 2019 as the result of a lab leak or whether it emerged naturally.
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The various intelligence agencies have been split on the matter for years.
In 2021, the intelligence community declassified a report that showed four agencies in the intelligence community had assessed with low confidence that the virus likely jumped from animals to humans naturally in the wild, while one assessed with moderate confidence that the pandemic was the result of a laboratory accident.
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Three other intelligence community elements were unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information, the report said.
The US Energy Department’s conclusion was first reported over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal, which said the classified report was based on new intelligence and noted in an update to a 2021 document. The DOE oversees a national network of labs in the US.
White House officials on Monday declined to confirm press reports about the assessment.
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