The US said on Friday it had new information suggesting the Covid-19 pandemic could have emerged from a Chinese laboratory and not through contact with infected animals, the latest salvo in the Donald Trump administration’s efforts to pressure Beijing over the virus’s origins.
Specifically, the US Department of State said it had obtained evidence that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick in the autumn of 2019 – before the first identified case was identified in the city – with symptoms it said were consistent with either Covid-19 or common seasonal illnesses.
China’s lack of transparency about the pandemic’s origin more than a year ago, as well as efforts to mask early shortcomings in the country’s response to the outbreak, made it difficult to draw clear conclusions, it said.
But the brief, unsigned statement, issued just days before Trump leaves office, provided no data to back up its claims.
“The virus could have emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, spreading in a pattern consistent with a natural epidemic,” it said. “Alternatively, a laboratory accident could resemble a natural outbreak if the initial exposure included only a few individuals and was compounded by an asymptomatic infection.”
China has repeatedly rejected charges that the virus might have emerged from a laboratory. The US did not say how it obtained new information about illnesses at the lab.
The statement comes as China faces criticism for initially preventing some members of a World Health Organization (WHO) mission from entering the country as part of an effort to trace the origin of Covid-19, saying they had not passed health screenings.
While the experts were eventually granted clearance, China had already been criticized by the WHO for delaying the mission’s plans to visit.
China has been under scrutiny since the outbreak exploded in and around Wuhan, but the Trump administration also sought to pin more blame on authorities in Beijing after the pandemic took off in the US and deaths soared.
Trump and US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo have frequently referred to the illness as the “China virus”, “China plague” and “Wuhan virus”.
For its part, China is mounting a campaign to cast doubt the virus originated within its borders. State media have played up research suggesting that there were cases in Italy and the US that predate those in Wuhan and hinted that the pathogen could have entered the country via frozen food or packaging.
On Friday it was announced that 2 million people had died worldwide from the outbreak, with almost 400,000 deaths in the US.