China shared data, research on COVID-19 origin: foreign ministry

China has shared its COVID-19 origin tracing data and contributed the most to global research, the foreign ministry said on Monday.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Mao Ning made the remarks at a regular press briefing in Beijing after World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged China to be more transparent about sharing data.

After the COVID-19 outbreak, a WHO expert group visited laboratories in Wuhan and conducted in-depth exchanges with scientific researchers before reaching the conclusion that a laboratory leak was extremely unlikely, Mao said.

"The US for a long time has insisted on politicizing, weaponizing and instrumentalizing the COVID-19 origin tracing and hyped the biological weapons theory, laboratory leakage theory and other lies and fallacies without any evidence, severely poisoning the atmosphere of global scientific traceability," the spokesperson said.

Virus traceability was a scientific issue and research should be carried out by global scientists, Mao said.

"It's the shared responsibility of all countries to find the source of COVID-19," she said.

"On the issue of novel coronavirus traceability, China has shared the most data and research results and made the greatest contribution to global traceability research."

The US ignored these scientific conclusions and suggestions and blindly presses the World Health Organization to repeatedly ask China for traceability, making its purpose plain, Mao said.

"The US claims to attach importance to the origin of COVID-19, but it never invited WHO to send an expert group to the US for traceability cooperation, never provided any early data and ignored the concerns of the international community about Fort Detrick and military biological bases around the world," Mao said.

Politicizing COVID-19 origin tracing would hinder global scientific cooperation in tracing the source of the virus, split global solidarity efforts and undermine the global health governance mechanism, she said.

"We hope that the WHO Secretariat will uphold the scientific and objective position, abandon the political interference of many countries, especially the US, and strive to play a positive role in the global scientific traceability research," Mao said. "We also once again urge the US to immediately stop its interference, respond to the reasonable concerns of the international community, share the data of its early suspected cases, open the situation of Fort Detrick and the biological laboratories set up around the world, and give an explanation to the people of the world."

(Produced by Yu Dian and Liu Ruomeng)