China slammed a declassified US intelligence report on the origins of the COVID pandemic as unscientific and has no credibility.

The updated US intelligence briefing, published on Saturday, said that a natural origin and a lab leak were both plausible hypotheses to explain how COVID first infected humans, but that the truth may never be known.

In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Sunday: “A lie repeated a thousand times is still a lie”, adding that US intelligence services “have a reputation for fraud and deception.”

“The tracing of the origins of the novel coronavirus is a serious and complex issue that should and can only be researched through the cooperation of global scientists,” he said, as reported by the website of China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry.

China has consistently denied allegations that the virus was leaked from a specialist laboratory in the city of Wuhan, where COVID was said to be first identified at the end of 2019.

Wang also repeated China’s calls for the United States to open up its own laboratory at Fort Detrick to international experts.

Source: Agencies