Ambassador Cui Tiankai, in a CNN interview aired last Sunday, Feb. 14, added to Beijing’s increasing demand for the World Health Organization (WHO) to investigate the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus in the U.S., without offering any evidence that would suggest how the virus may have originated from there.
In the interview, Cui was asked if WHO experts would be granted “full access to China” as they investigate the origin of the coronavirus in Wuhan. “They are already in Wuhan. They have been in Wuhan for quite a few days. My question is, will they be allowed to come here [to America] to do the same thing?” he responded.
When presented with theories of the virus potentially originating from a Wuhan laboratory or wet market, Cui disregarded them and said, “I think when people make accusations, they have to prove these accusations.”
Coronavirus origins
Leaked Chinese documents from the South China Morning Post revealed that the first confirmed case of the virus was identified in Wuhan on Nov. 17, 2019.
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Though researchers worldwide are currently unclear on where and how the virus first appeared, SARS-CoV-2 is widely known to have originated in Wuhan.
The Chinese Communist Party has neither confirmed nor denied the legitimacy of these documents but doesn’t consider the date a valid starting point in investigating the virus’s origin.
While Chinese government officials have brought up reports of early cases emerging in Brazil or Italy, none of them list a date before Nov. 17. No existing evidence currently known lists a confirmed COVID-19 case emerging earlier than this date. The Chinese regime has also admitted to destroying early samples of the virus.
Despite claims by a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology of “zero infection” among lab staff and students, the U.S. State Department stated last month that it “had reason to believe” there were numerous researchers at the Institute with symptoms resembling those of COVID-19 in the autumn of 2019.
The Chinese Communist Party had also blamed the U.S. for starting the pandemic on other occasions, such as last March when China Foreign Ministry spokespersons claimed that the U.S. Army brought the virus to Wuhan through their participation in a military sports event. The ministry also suggested last month for WHO officials to “conduct origin-tracing” in the United States.
Cui mentioned in the same interview that a report from British Broadcasting Corp. of mass rape, sexual abuse, and torture of Uyghur women detained in internment camps had “untrustworthy” sources. The report was based on several interviews from former detainees and a guard and stated that these cases occurred in the far-western Xinjiang region of China.
More than a million ethnic minorities, including Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uyghur people, are detained in these camps. Beijing has officially proclaimed them to be “vocational training centers.”
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