China criticizes the “dark history” of US intelligence services after decision to investigate origin of COVID-19

China on Thursday criticized the “dark history” of the US intelligence services, after President Joe Biden ordered them to investigate the origins of COVID-19.

Rejecting the need for a new investigation into the pandemic, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said Thursday that “the motives and purposes of the administration Biden they’re clear”.

“The world has long known the dark history of US intelligence services,” Zhao Lijian said, referring to the United States’ baseless allegations of weapons of mass destruction that justified its invasion of Iraq.

President Biden on Wednesday ordered US intelligence agencies to inform him in the next three months whether the origin of COVID-19 in China was due to an animal or a laboratory accident.

The hypothesis that the virus came out of a laboratory, initially dismissed as “very unlikely” by a mission of the World Health Organization (WHO) that visited China, has resurfaced in recent days.

The first cases of covid-19 were identified in late 2019 in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan, before the virus spread around the world and caused more than 3.5 million deaths.

The Chinese authorities have always denied the theory that the coronavirus emerged in a laboratory, specifically at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, directly pointed out by former US President Donald Trump.

This week, an article in the American newspaper Wall Street Journal (WSJ) rekindled this hypothesis and requests for in-depth research are multiplying, even among the scientific community.