China on Friday made a bizarre claim when it said that coronavirus broke out in the various parts of the world last year but it was the only one to have reported and acted first. Beijing, with this statement, has tried to deny the widely-held view that the deadly virus originated in Wuhan before turning out to be a pandemic.
Interestingly, China, besides denying the US allegations that Covid-19 has emerged from a bio-lab in Wuhan, also rejected that it emanated from a wet market in the central Chinese city from bats or pangolins before infecting humans.
Chinese Foreign Ministry Hua Chunying said, “Coronavirus is a new kind of virus as more and more facts emerge as reports reveal, we all know that the epidemic broke out in various places in the world at the end of last year, while China was the first to report the outbreak, identified the pathogen and shared the genome sequence with the world.”
These comments came in response to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s allegations of a cover-up by the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC). Pompeo had on Tuesday claimed that the pandemic was made worse by the Chinese Communist Party’s cover-up.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry statement was made as the World Health Organization (WHO) was gearing up to probe the origin of the deadly coronavirus.
Covid-19 has so far infected over 36 million people and killed more than 1 million across the world. The US is the worst affected country with over 7.6 million cases and more than 2,12,000 deaths. The US is followed by India 6.9 million Covid-19 cases so far.
With agency input