US Senator Tom Cotton accused Chinese officials of misleading public opinion about the origin of the deadly Corona virus, which spread in Wuhan, China, and moved to 23 countries around the world, noting that he believed the virus was developed within Chinese laboratories as a biological weapon.
The Republican senator said during a hearing of the Armed Services Committee, that the spread of the virus is worse than the Chernobyl disaster, which is the disaster of a nuclear reactor explosion in Belarus in 1986 that killed thousands and injured thousands of others with cancer diseases. The Corona virus, which affects the respiratory system, has resulted in the death of 362 people so far, while the number of infected cases has reached more than 17 thousand people.
Cotton insisted that Beijing did not reveal the true number of injuries and was “lying about it from the start” to reduce the seriousness of the epidemic. Chinese officials were also accused of reducing the number of cases and reducing the number of reports weeks before official recognition of the virus spread.
“They also claimed, for nearly two months, until the beginning of this week, that the virus arose in a seafood market in Wuhan,” the senator said, referring to a study published by the medical journal The Lancet. “This is not the case.”
“Of the 40 cases, 14 of them had no contact with the seafood market, including the first patient,” Cotton said. He pointed the US senator to the Wuhan National Laboratory for Biosafety under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is investigating “the most dangerous pathogens.”
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