China accuses US of being Covid-19 ground zero in fiery white paper, claims America 'tried to shift the blame'

In what could be seen as a provocative escalation of the global debate over Covid-19's origins, China has released a government white paper accusing the United States of being a possible ground zero for the pandemic that has killed more than seven million people worldwide.

The document, issued Wednesday (Apr 30) by the State Council Information Office, pushes back against renewed claims from Donald Trump's presidential campaign that the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Instead, Beijing suggests it is the US that owes the world an explanation.

"The US government, instead of facing squarely its failure in response to Covid-19 and reflecting on its shortcomings, has tried to shift the blame and divert people's attention by shamelessly politicising SARS-Cov-2 origins tracing," the paper reads, as reported by the Express.

Calling for a "thorough and in-depth investigation" into the pandemic's roots—this time on American soil—Chinese officials cite what they describe as "substantial evidence" that SARS-CoV-2 "might have emerged in the United States earlier than its officially claimed timeline and earlier than the outbreak in China."

Slamming the US, China's white paper says that the US "should not continue to pretend to be deaf and dumb" and answer the global community's questions.

It accuses the US of making "China the primary scapegoat for its own mismanaged Covid-19 response. The US government's indifference and delayed actions wasted the precious time China had secured for the global fight against the pandemic."

Among the evidence, it cites a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study that found Covid-19 antibodies in 106 out of 7,389 blood samples from nine states between December 2019 and January 2020. It also mentions a National Institutes of Health (NIH) analysis showing antibody presence across all 50 states by March 2020.

Beijing's bold move appears to be a direct rebuttal to mounting scrutiny from American intelligence agencies. US intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI now acknowledge that a lab leak from Wuhan remains a plausible theory. Meanwhile, many scientists still support a zoonotic origin, where the virus jumped from animals to humans.