The United States distanced itself on Tuesday from a theory supported by former President Donald Trump that the coronavirus came from a Chinese laboratory, and expressed support for experts at the World Organization of health.
WHO investigators visiting Wuhan, the first Chinese city hit by the Covid-19 epidemic, ruled on Tuesday the hypothesis of the leak of a laboratory
"highly improbable".
Read also: Trump defends the use of "Chinese virus", a "very exact" formula
The State Department, whose chief Mike Pompeo under the tenure of the ex-Republican president, defended this theory, said awaiting the full investigation of the experts.
"Rather than jumping to conclusions that can be driven by anything but science, we want to see where the data takes us, where the science takes us, and our conclusions will be based on that,"
the spokesperson said. of American diplomacy Ned Price.
"We fully support this investigation,"
he added.
Mike Pompeo, very virulent against China, had led the charge against Beijing by pushing the responsibility for the pandemic on the communist regime, at a time when Donald Trump was widely criticized for his management of the health crisis.
He had denounced China's efforts to cover up the real number of cases of the disease and had not completely ruled out that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had even been deliberately spread.
Five days before the inauguration of Democrat Joe Biden, the State Department said it knew that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had fallen ill,
"before the identification of the first case of the epidemic, with symptoms compatible with those, both of Covid-19, and of common seasonal diseases ”.
According to Ned Price, however, it was
"very clear"
that this information had not made it possible to reach a conclusion, in one sense or another.
The spokesperson, on the other hand, shared the criticism of the Beijing cover-ups.
"I clearly think that the Chinese, at least so far, have not offered the transparency that we need, and (...) that the international community needs so that we can prevent this type of pandemic from happening to new, ”
Ned Price said.
Asked whether China has fully cooperated with the WHO team, he said,
"The question remains open."
Donald Trump had announced the withdrawal of the United States from this UN institution, a decision that Joe Biden immediately reversed when he came to power.
