US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said Monday that China will have to “be more honest about what happened three years ago in Wuhan with the origin of the Covid-19 crisis” if the US and China are going to be able to work together.
Burns added that the Chinese surveillance balloon and Beijing’s position on the war in Ukraine are “two of the most important issues that we’re dealing with right now.”
Burns’ comments on Covid were made in reference to strengthening the World Health Organization, in response to a question about political polarization in the US and how it impacts America’s standing and ability to tackle geopolitical challenges.
Burns was speaking at a US Chamber of Commerce event the day after news emerged that the Department of Energy assessed with “low confidence” that the deadly pandemic likely originated from a lab leak. While Burns was not speaking specifically about the latest assessment, the Department of Energy’s new finding underscores how US intelligence agencies remain divided on the origins of the pandemic – in part because Beijing has not been cooperative with efforts to investigate the matter.
The latest assessment, which was an update of the intelligence community’s views on the origins of the pandemic, further added to the divide among the 18 intelligence community agencies. In 2021, a declassified intelligence community report found four agencies in the intelligence community assessed with low confidence that the virus likely jumped from animals to humans naturally in the wild, while the FBI assessed with moderate confidence that the pandemic was the result of a laboratory accident.
A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more…
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