The World Health Organization assembly room with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus delivering a speech in May 2020 Photo: AFP

The COVID-19 "lab leak" theory totally twisted facts and it's merely a lie fabricated by anti-China forces for political purposes, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said on Wednesday in response to a media report that claimed WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had once acknowledged the theory. 

Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson from Chinese Foreign Ministry, told Wednesday's press briefing that China invited a WHO expert team to visit the relevant laboratory in Wuhan, and the joint research report clearly concluded laboratory leak from the Wuhan lab is highly unlikely.

British media outlet Daily Mail wrote in a report that Tedros "privately believes the Covid pandemic started following a leak from a Chinese laboratory," citing a senior government source.

The hype up from the media report, citing an anonymous source, totally ignores the facts and has vicious intentions behind. It once again proves that the lab leak theory is nothing but a political maneuver by relevant parties to smear China, which hinders scientific tracing for origins and undermines international anti-epidemic cooperation, Wang noted. 

The British report has also been labeled by the WHO as false, which noted that Tedros did not make such remarks neither openly nor privately. Tedros absolutely opposed the report, Wang said. 

More clues of virus origins tend to target a global spere. The US government has yet to give a convincing answer to several key questions, like when exactly the COVID-19 broke out in the country, and about highly suspicious activities in laboratories at Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina, the Chinese spokesperson said. 

He said that if laboratory problems are to be studied, highly suspicious laboratories such as Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina must be investigated first.

And if relevant parties are truly concerned about tracing COVID-19 origins, they should shift their attention to the question on why the US has not directly responded to the doubts of the international community, Wang said, calling on the US to open up its labs for international probe and support coronavirus origins tracing. 

Global Times