Hong Kong (CNN) — U.S. President Joe Biden’s call for a renewed investigation into the origins of covid-19 feels like déjà vu in Beijing.

Just over a year ago, as covid-19 infections surged in the U.S., former President Donald Trump began promoting a fringe theory that the virus had escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, the Chinese city where it was first detected. Beijing reacted angrily to the claim, accusing Trump of trying to turn China into a scapegoat for his own failure to contain the outbreak at home.

This week, a previously undisclosed intelligence report emerged, claiming that several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in November 2019 and had to be hospitalized. Under mounting public pressure, Biden ordered the intelligence community to step up its efforts to re-examine how the virus originated, including the possibility that it emerged from a laboratory accident.

Naturally, that stirred Beijing’s anger once again, and led China to revive a counter-conspiracy theory that the virus actually began in the U.S.

“The United States does not care about facts or truth at all, nor is it interested in a serious scientific study on the origins. Its only goal is to use the pandemic for stigmatization and political manipulation to shift the blame onto others,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian.

Zhao then made reference to Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army biomedical research laboratory in Maryland that Chinese officials and state media have linked — without evidence — to the emergence of the virus.

“What secrets are hidden in the suspicion-shrouded Fort Detrick and the more than 200 U.S. biological laboratories around the world?” Zhao said, adding that the United States “owes the world an explanation.”

The Fort Detrick theory began appearing in Chinese state media reports last March, but gained significant traction in China earlier this year, when the World Health Organization (WHO) visited Wuhan to examine the origins of the virus.

When the investigation concluded in February, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called on the United States to follow its example of “acting in a positive, science-based and cooperative manner” and to invite WHO experts “for an origin-tracing study.”

In March, the WHO published a report on its investigation in China, concluding that it was “extremely unlikely” that the coronavirus had leaked from a laboratory. The report has drawn criticism from governments around the world over questions of transparency.

But from Beijing’s point of view, there is little reason to accept another investigation, no matter how much Washington pushes for it.

Source: CNN En Español