BEIJING – China has lashed out at a report about a lab in the city of Wuhan where the coronavirus was first detected, saying it was driven by politics in the US.

“US politicians are rehashing the lab-leak theory to smear China in disregard of facts,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Monday at a regular press briefing in Beijing. “Such acts are driven by ill-intentions. This will only hamper science-based origins tracing and undermine international anti-Covid cooperation.”

China has “made it clear on multiple occasions that the lab-leak theory from Wuhan is nothing but a lie fabricated by anti-China forces for political purposes and it has nothing to do with science”, he said.

Vanity Fair and the investigative news outlet ProPublica published an article last Friday that alleged the Wuhan Institute of Virology was more troubled than previously known.

It also said Chinese President Xi Jinping may have been briefed on problems at the facility in November 2019, months before the virus was first detected in Wuhan.

Zhao sidestepped a question about Xi and the lab at the press briefing. 

The lab-leak theory has angered China since former US president Donald Trump pushed it during his term.

Republicans on the Senate Health, Education, Labour, and Pensions Committee released a report last Thursday in an attempt to pressure the Biden administration and congressional Democrats to consider more seriously the theory that Covid-19 started in a lab.

That report set out how the virus could have spread from a laboratory leak, although they underscore the findings lack indisputable evidence.

Most scientists support the conclusion in a Science Magazine paper published in August that the virus jumped from animal to humans, likely in the crowded wet markets in Wuhan. BLOOMBERG