Her spokesman said Thursday that former German Chancellor Angela Merkel dismissed allegations she had covered up on intelligence reports on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
The commentary published three newspaper reports that Germany’s BND spy agency concluded in 2020 that the coronavirus was likely to leak unexpectedly from Chinese labs, but the finding was never released to the public.
A spokeswoman told the Tagesspiegel newspaper in Berlin when asked if Merkel, who left the office in 2021, had withheld information from the public, a spokeswoman told the Tagesspiegel newspaper in Berlin, when a spokeswoman told the Tagesspiegel newspaper in Berlin, a spokeswoman told the Tagesspiegel newspaper in Berlin.
Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, declined to discuss the reports.
“In terms of intelligence discoveries, this is not the place to discuss them,” he said in a news conference Wednesday.
Reports published on Sunit Zeitung Neue Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit said that the presidents of BND and Germany asked scientists to examine evidence in terms of laboratory leak theory.
The paper says investigators concluded that lab leaks should be attributed to 80% to 95% of the possibility based on public domain information.
This intense theory suggests that the SARS-COV-2 virus that causes the COVID-19 disease originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which studied the coronavirus and began to spread through some kind of accident or failure in the laboratory.
The discoveries of the German intelligence community have not been made public yet. Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported that while the BND believes it has reasonable evidence to support the theory, not all researchers on the panel are convinced.
Another major theory of the origins of the pandemic is that the virus has purely natural origins, just like the SARS outbreak in 2002-03.
Beijing’s response
Earlier in Beijing, China urged caution and political restrictions after reports that Germany’s BND intelligence agencies gathered reasonable evidence that the coronavirus pandemic originated in a laboratory leak in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
“As for the coronavirus issue, China firmly rejects any form of political gesture,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning said in Beijing.
She said any discussion on scientific issues about Covid-19 should be left to scientists.
Mao also noted that an international team led by the World Health Organization visited the Wuhan laboratory as part of their investigation into the origins of the pandemic. The team largely dismissed the so-called “lab leak” theory in 2021.
Nevertheless, the WHO stressed that all assumptions about the origin of the SARS-COV-2 virus are still on the table. Until December, UN agencies called on Beijing to provide more data related to the pandemic.
