Zhao Lijian

The US' planned recommendations to the WHO urging more testing and pushing back on the idea that cold chain could spread coronavirus are a political farce with a preset outcome whose purpose is nothing more than to smear and suppress China, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday.

The so-called recommendations by the US are neither scientific nor serious, as they completely ignore the previous research results of global scientists, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at Wednesday's media briefing. 

The US should be fully aware that novel coronavirus is likely to be transmitted through frozen food and is extremely unlikely to be transmitted from a laboratory, a clear-cut conclusion made in the joint WHO-China study on the origins of coronavirus, Zhao said.  

As for the raw data, WHO experts also made it clear on many occasions that the expert group obtained a large amount of raw data and information and fully understood that some of the information could not be copied or taken out of the country due to personal privacy concerns, Zhao said.

Experts from several American federal agencies are drafting recommendations to be submitted to the WHO for new studies on coronavirus origins. The recommendations are expected to push back on a hypothesis that the virus could have spread via frozen-food products, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the outside world has lots of questions for the US, which reported some cases earlier than its first reported case and an unknown respiratory disease dating back to July 2019, Zhao said. He asked if the US will show openness and transparency and disclose detailed information about these cases as soon as possible.

"If the US is fair, why doesn't it open Fort Detrick to international experts for investigation or research?" Zhao continued. 

China hopes that the US will adopt the same attitude of scientific cooperation as China did and carry out cooperation with the WHO in tracing the coronavirus origins, and not politicize scientific research, nor deny science with conspiracy theories or undermine the common cause of fighting the epidemic out of selfish interests, Zhao said.

Global Times