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 robust conclusion.
US diplomats have consistently raised the need for China to be transparent with the world about the origins of Covid-19 but China has not increased transparency, a senior administration official explained.
While the new assessment has resurfaced questions about the origins of the pandemic, Burns said the Chinese surveillance balloon which the US shot down and Beijing’s position on the war in Ukraine are “two of the most important issues that we’re dealing with right now.” Burns said it was “a moment where we’ve got to manage these differences, hold China to account and build up our alliance system out here in the Indo-Pacific.”
Burns noted that the US thought it “had a chance in 2023 for greater stability” coming out of the meeting between President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in November, noting that “a lot of that conversation was focused, frankly, on the differences between us, in our interest, both of us, in trying to manage those differences effectively so that we don’t end up in a conflict, God forbid, between our two countries.”
Those prospects were stymied when the US detected the Chinese surveillance balloon in American airspace, Burns indicated, noting that, “we’re now in this surreal moment, where the Chinese who I think you know, lost the debate over the balloon, globally lost influence and credibility around the world because of what they have done.”
“They’re now blaming this on us. It’s a little bit Orwellian. And it’s a little bit frustrating because I think everybody knows the truth here,” Burns said.
Burns’ call for transparency on Covid-19 in the context of strengthening the WHO – a key global agency tasked with responding to pandemics – was mentioned as part of a catalog of things that Burns said “most Americans” would want Beijing and the US to work together on, including climate change and food security.
The State Department has repeatedly called for Beijing to be transparent about the origins of Covid.
“It’s in everyone’s interest, it’s – including in the interest of the PRC, that they work with the international community, lend a degree of transparency to the international investigations into COVID origins so that neither they nor we nor any country around the world should have to pay this kind of steep cost again,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in November.