China needs to be ‘more honest’ about COVID origins, US ambassador says

The top US envoy to China on Monday urged the East Asian country’s government to be more transparent about the origins of COVID-19 after a bombshell report that the US Energy Department concluded the virus likely leaked out of a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Speaking at a US Chamber of Commerce event Monday, Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said the Chinese Communist Party needed to “be more honest about what happened three years ago in Wuhan with the origin of the COVID-19 crisis.”

Burns’ comments were made in reference to strengthening the World Health Organization.

Burns argued that boosting the global health agency, tasked with responding to pandemics, is something “most Americans” would want the US and China to work together on. 

The diplomat added that he believes it is necessary to push China to be more transparent in order to promote cooperation between Washington and Beijing, and that China must take a more active role in the WHO if the United Nations health agency was to be strengthened.

The Department of Energy report on COVID origins declared, with “low confidence,” that COVID-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological weapons program but most likely leaked out of a lab researching coronaviruses by accident. 

The DOE’s findings, reported first Sunday by the Wall Street Journal, seem to match what Republicans on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee wrote last year in an interim report that doubted the so-called “natural zoonotic origin” theory – a hypothesis that the virus jumped from animals to humans outside a lab. 

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China has rejected calls for transparency from the WHO and the US as probes into the origins of COVID-19 continue.

China’s vice minister of the National Health Commission, Zeng Yixin, demanded in 2021  that the WHO dismiss the lab leak theory as a rumor, arguing that the idea that COVID-19 may have escaped from a Wuhan lab ran counter to common sense and science.

“It is impossible for us to accept such an origin-tracing plan,” the senior Chinese health official said.

Burns noted Monday that US-China relations have been strained since the downing of a Chinese spy balloon that drifted over the US mainland earlier this month. 

“We’re now in this surreal moment where the Chinese, who I think lost the debate over the balloon globally, lost influence and credibility around the world because of what they’ve done – they’re now blaming this on us,” Burns said.

“It’s a little bit Orwellian. And it’s a little bit frustrating, because I think everybody knows the truth here,” he added. 

Burns called the Chinese surveillance balloon and Beijing’s position on the war in Ukraine the “two of the most important issues that we’re dealing with right now.”