China revealed its biological weapons ambition quite a while before the Covid-19 pandemic ravaged the world, a US intelligence report has said.
The House Intelligence Committee on December 15 put out a declassified report examining the response of the Intelligence Community towards the pandemic following a two-year investigation, news agency ANI reported.
Moneycontrol could not independently verify the news.
The report aims to examine the posture of the IC in order to support global health security policymakers, the performance of the IC in the early months of the pandemic, as well as the steps that the IC mist take in an attempt to strengthen any future response to the pandemic.
“In 2005, the US State Department publicly stated that the US assessment that China also operates an offensive biological weapons programme, specifically identifying two Chinese entities as likely involved, one of which is the Fifth Institute. In a 2006 declaration of compliance with the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention, China acknowledged that the Fifth Institute specifically researches SARS coronaviruses,” stated the report as quoted by Indo-Pacific Centre for Strategic Communications.
In the previous week, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), called on China to share the data asked by the world health body for better understanding of the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We continue to call on China to share the data and conduct the studies we have requested, and which we continue to request. As I have said many times before, all hypotheses about the origins of this pandemic remain of the table,” stated the WHO Chief during a weekly press conference.
Experts have put forth two dominant theories that speak of the origins of the virus; the first being that SARS-CoV-2 is an outcome of a natural zoonotic spillover. The second one states that the virus has infected human beings as a consequence of an incident related to a research.
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