Former head of US diplomacy Mike Pompeo said Tuesday that the expert report on the origins of COVID-19 is “a sham” continuing the “disinformation campaign” by the Communist Party of China and the World Health Organization (WHO ).
WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus “collaborated” with Chinese President Xi Jinping “to conceal person-to-person transmission at a CRITICAL juncture,” former Donald Trump Secretary of State said on Twitter.
Pompeo led, on the side of the United States, the offensive to accuse China of being responsible for allowing the pandemic to spread throughout the world, and the WHO of having failed in its mission in order not to limit the power of Beijing.
In particular, Pompeo claimed to have evidence showing that the coronavirus could have come from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the first known cases of covid-19 were detected in late December 2019.
The report of the WHO experts charged with shedding light on the origins of the pandemic said in principle that the hypothesis of a laboratory incident is considered “extremely unlikely”.
According to the report, of which the AFP obtained a copy on Monday, its authors judge the transmission of the virus to humans by an intermediate animal “probable to very probable.”
However, on Tuesday Tedros called for a new investigation into the hypothesis of an escape of the covid-19 virus from a laboratory and criticized the lack of access of the experts to the data.
“The Wuhan Institute of Virology continues to be the most likely source of the virus, and the WHO is an accomplice,” Pompeo reaffirmed on Tuesday, defending the withdrawal of the United States from the UN agency, whose return was ordered by new president Joe Biden.
The Biden administration has yet to respond to the report.
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